Jahdane Olivierre, a 29-year-old Black man from Brooklyn, went to Richard’s Hall & Lounge on Avenue L in Canarsie in the early morning hours of November 7, 2020, expecting an ordinary night of music and company. Instead, the calm shattered around 2:30 a.m., when gunfire erupted at or just outside the venue near East 94th Street, turning the lounge and its doorway into a place of panic and scrambling feet.
Police responding to a 911 call reached the address—reported as 9402 Avenue
L—and found Olivierre outside on the sidewalk, hit multiple times. The wounds were described in contemporaneous reporting as strikes to his torso and leg, with another account describing gunshot injuries to his chest and leg. In the blur of flashing lights and shouted instructions, medics rushed him to Brookdale Hospital, but he did not survive.
In the hours after the shooting, the details that usually explain a killing—who started it, what was said, what the shooter wanted—remained stubbornly out of reach. Investigators said they had not yet established a motive, and no clear description of a gunman was made public in early reports. Coverage at the time also described witnesses as unwilling to cooperate, leaving detectives to reconstruct the moment largely from fragments: a late-night crowd, sudden shots, and a man collapsing into the cold air outside the lounge.
As the neighborhood tried to make sense of what happened, some pieces of Olivierre’s life surfaced in local reporting: he lived nearby on East 87th Street, and his family spoke of him as a devoted parent with a creative streak. But publicly, the case stayed in a grim holding pattern. News accounts from the day of the shooting and shortly afterward reported that no arrests had been made as detectives from the 69th Precinct and Brooklyn South homicide investigators continued to work the investigation.
