Quamane “Quae” Rogers, 26, a Black man, was killed on the afternoon of March 25, 2023, in Staten Island, New York, when gunfire erupted in the Park Hill area. In the middle of a Saturday that had looked ordinary just moments earlier, police were called to Park Hill Avenue near Sobel Court just before 3 p.m., where they found Rogers with a gunshot wound to the face.
He was pronounced dead at the scene, and the neighborhood was left with the kind of stunned silence that follows a shooting carried out in broad daylight, when people are still out, moving through their day, and the shock travels fast from stoops to sidewalks to phone screens.
Early reporting offered few answers beyond the blunt facts: the location, the time, the fatal wound, and the absence of an immediate arrest. Police said the circumstances were unclear in the first hours after the shooting, and the investigation opened with the familiar uncertainty of a street turned into a crime scene—tape lines, officers canvassing, and neighbors trying to make sense of what had just happened.
In the days that followed, services were arranged for Rogers in Staten Island, marking the private grief that comes after a public act of violence. His death was formally recorded as occurring on March 25, 2023, and a visitation was announced for early April at a Staten Island funeral home, a small window of time for family and friends to gather, remember him, and say goodbye in a setting far removed from the curbside urgency of the original police response.
Months later, police announced a breakthrough. On September 13, 2023, Daniel Battaforyen, a Staten Island man, was arrested in connection with the killing. According to a report describing the arrest, investigators tied him to the March 25 homicide at 225 Park Hill Avenue, and he was charged with murder, manslaughter, criminal possession of a loaded firearm, and criminal possession of a firearm. The report noted the case remained ongoing, with no further public detail offered about what led detectives from the original scene to an arrest roughly half a year later.
