Just before dawn on September 28, 2015, gunfire shattered the quiet on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, and Charles Williams, 26, a man from Brooklyn, was struck and went down in the roadway outside a hookah lounge.
Investigators said the violence grew out of a confrontation tied to the Crystal Hookah Lounge/Crystal Lounge on Steinway Street between 25th and 28th avenues.
Accounts from police spokespeople and early reporting described a dispute that spilled from the venue to the sidewalk, where Williams was arguing with another man as a second man moved to a white BMW, reached inside, produced a gun, and opened fire before speeding away in the car. At the scene, officers recovered multiple shell casings as neighbors and bystanders tried to make sense of the rapid shots they’d mistaken for something harmless until the flashing lights arrived.
When officers reached Williams, he had been hit multiple times, and despite the rush to get him help, he did not survive. Reporting named the receiving hospital as Mount Sinai Queens—long known in the neighborhood by earlier names, including Astoria General—where he was pronounced dead shortly after the shooting.
As detectives worked the scene, they found that Williams was armed as well; when his body was moved, a. 38-caliber revolver was discovered in his possession. The detail added a tense, unresolved edge to the story of what happened in those last moments—whether the gun ever came out, whether anyone saw it, whether it changed how the confrontation unfolded—questions that hung over the investigation as police canvassed for witnesses and video.
In the immediate aftermath, the NYPD said the shooter was being sought and that no one had been taken into custody, with early reports repeating that the investigation was ongoing and arrests had not been made. Publicly available coverage of the incident focused on the suspect’s escape in the white BMW and the scramble to piece together the argument that turned a night out into a fatal street shooting.
