On the evening of February 22, 2015, a 27-year-old man named Shakim Rivera was found unconscious on Bayview Place near Remsen Avenue in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn. He had been shot in the head. Emergency medical services rushed him to Brookdale Hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival.
At the time, Rivera was the leader of the Cypress Gangsta Crips, a subset of the larger Eight Trey Crips gang based in the Cypress Hills Houses of East New York. His death was not a random act of violence but rather the culmination of an internal gang dispute. Just days before Rivera's murder, on February 19, 2015, another high-ranking member of the gang, Demetrius 'Duke' Graham, was killed. Members of the Cypress Gangsta Crips, including a man named Jason Soto, also known as 'Twin,' believed Rivera was responsible for Graham's death.
Seeking retaliation, Soto traveled from Pennsylvania to Brooklyn with the intent to kill Rivera. On the night of the murder, Soto lured Rivera to the location in Canarsie. There, Soto and another alleged member of the gang shot Rivera in the back of the head.
For years, the case remained officially unsolved, although law enforcement suspected the murder was gang-related. In the course of a long-term investigation into gang violence in and around the Cypress Hills Houses, authorities gathered more evidence. In March 2018, during a sentencing for unrelated federal gun and drug trafficking charges, a judge found that prosecutors had presented 'clear and convincing' evidence that Jason Soto was responsible for Shakim Rivera's murder.
Finally, in December 2024, nearly a decade after the killing, a two-count indictment was unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn, formally charging Jason Soto with the murder of Shakim Rivera. Soto was arrested and faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison, or possibly the death penalty, if convicted. The indictment was a result of a joint investigation by the FBI and the NYPD aimed at dismantling violent gangs in Brooklyn.
