On a summer evening in Brooklyn, New York, 29-year-old Shaqwanda Staley was fatally shot on July 12, 2017. Staley, a mother to a young daughter, was with a group of people in the courtyard of the Stuyvesant Garden Houses when gunfire erupted just after 9 p.m. She was struck in the back and was later pronounced dead at Kings County Hospital.
Another woman, 21-year-old Chynna Battle, was also killed in the shooting.
Investigators believe that neither Staley nor Battle were the intended targets of the shooting. It is thought that the gunmen were aiming for someone else in the crowd in retaliation for a previous incident. Witnesses reported seeing multiple men enter the courtyard just before the shooting began.
In the months following the shooting, an investigation led to the identification of two suspects. In October 2017, Anthony Alexander, then 19, and Nazir Saunders, then 22, were arrested in South Carolina. The two men were charged in connection with the deaths of Staley and Battle.
Following a trial, both Alexander and Saunders were convicted of two counts of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon in May 2019. Prosecutors stated that the men fired 10 bullets into the crowd, missing their intended target and killing the two mothers instead. In June 2019, both men were sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for their roles in the fatal shooting.
