In the early hours of a Sunday morning in March 2017, a life was cut short in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Jefferson Exantus, a 22-year-old male from the Bronx, was inside the Brooklyn Asylum nightclub on Flushing Avenue when a dispute turned fatal. The young man was shot in the face and head, a sudden and brutal end to what had begun as a night out. The incident occurred at approximately 5:20 a.m. on March 19, 2017.
Emergency services were called to the scene, and Exantus was rushed to Woodhull Hospital, but his injuries were too severe, and he was pronounced dead.
The New York Police Department immediately launched an investigation into the homicide. Detectives learned that an argument between Exantus and another man preceded the deadly shooting. In the days and months that followed, the police worked to identify the person responsible for Exantus’s death. While no immediate arrests were made, the investigation did lead to the identification of a person of interest. Authorities released a photograph of a man in his twenties who they believed was connected to the shooting and asked the public for their assistance in locating him.
Despite the efforts of law enforcement and the public plea for information, the case of Jefferson Exantus’s murder has grown cold over the years. Online sources available through 2017 indicated that the investigation was ongoing, but no subsequent reports of an arrest or conviction have been made public. The suspect sought by police in the months following the shooting has not been publicly identified by name, and the case remains an unsolved homicide, leaving a family without answers and a community with the memory of a life taken too soon.
