Claretha Daniels, a 44-year-old Black woman from the Bronx, was killed just after midnight on May 24, 2024, when gunfire tore through the block outside an apartment building near Davidson Avenue and Evelyn Place in the University Heights area. Neighbors described a late-night hangout that curdled into a fistfight, the kind of street argument that usually burns out on its own—until someone broke away, went inside, and returned moments later with others as if coming back to finish what had
started.
When the shots rang out, Daniels and another resident, Justin Lawless, were hit in the chest. A third man was struck in the arm. All three were rushed to St. Barnabas Hospital, but Daniels and Lawless were pronounced dead. By daylight, detectives were back on the sidewalk, and a memorial began to grow across the street—flowers and candles accumulating in the place where the night had turned irreversible.
In the first hours after the shooting, police descriptions were spare and urgent: two male suspects dressed in dark clothing, believed to have fled on a red moped. Witness accounts added a frantic, uneven detail—suggesting that while the getaway may have involved a moped, the person who fired the shots bolted on foot. The scene itself offered only what violence always leaves behind: shell casings, shaken neighbors, and the unanswered question of who had decided the fight would end with bullets.
More than a year later, federal prosecutors tied the killings to a broader racketeering case involving members of Tren de Aragua. In a superseding indictment announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, prosecutors alleged that six defendants—Keiber Jaen Martinez, Samuel Gonzalez Castro, Eferson Morillo-Gomez, Keiver Silva-Jimenez, Keineyer Ibarra-Mujica, and Marlon Farias—agreed with others to kill Daniels and Lawless in the vicinity of 2290 Davidson Avenue and then carried out, or aided and abetted, the shooting that killed them and wounded a third victim.
The announcement laid out the status of the case as it stood at the time: multiple defendants were already in federal or state custody, one defendant was described as at large, and another was said to have been previously removed from the United States. The charges described by federal prosecutors included murder and assault with a dangerous weapon in aid of racketeering, firearms offenses tied to the killings, and related racketeering allegations—casting the May 24, 2024 shooting not as a one-off eruption, but as an event prosecutors say sits inside a larger pattern of organized violence.
