Angel Pomales, a 39-year-old Latino man from Brooklyn, was spending the late morning of April 26, 2016, inside the building where he lived on Linden Street in Bushwick when violence found him in the narrow space between apartments and the stairwell. Not long before noon, a 911 call drew officers and EMS to the address, and they found him collapsed at the doorway of an apartment, wounded by a single gunshot to his right shoulder.
He was rushed to Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, but the injury proved fatal, and he was pronounced dead at the hospital. The shooting happened inside the building, and the first fragments of the story that emerged from investigators painted a tense, fast-moving scene—one that began in the hallway and ended with a man bleeding out before help could arrive.
As detectives worked backward, sources familiar with the investigation told local reporters that Pomales had been seen interacting with several unidentified men in what the NYPD described as a possible drug transaction shortly before he was shot. That detail, hovering over the case like a shadow, offered a potential motive but not a name, and it left the most important questions unanswered: who pulled the trigger, and why, in a place that should have been safest—his own home.
In the days after the killing, police circulated surveillance images and appealed for help identifying men they wanted to question. Investigators said two men captured on security video were seen walking toward the scene and then running away afterward, and they asked the public to come forward with any information about who they were and what they knew. At the time of those reports, no arrests had been announced, and the case was still described as an active, ongoing investigation.
