A 22-year-old Queens man fatally shot a 23-year-old Brooklyn man before turning the gun on himself in his East New York apartment yesterday afternoon, according to police. Now two families are grasping for answers—and the fact that a third man appears to have been trapped in a closet in the apartment at the time only raises more questions.
The murder-suicide has the Daily News suggesting it was a gay love triangle today, but the NYPD and neighbors aren't talking about that aspect. According to the police, a neighbor called 911 around 3 p.m. to report shots fired at 294 Milford Street. When they arrived on the scene cops found Tory Curtis and Jason Lopez dead. "A preliminary investigation determined that the victim, Tory Curtis, was involved in a verbal dispute with the suspect, Jason Lopez, which escalated into the suspect shooting the victim and then shooting himself."
Lopez had arrived at the apartment and found Curtis, who the News describes as his boyfriend, with an unidentified third man. The third man reportedly hid in (or was forced into) a closet while the two fought, only running out in a panic after the shootings. "Some young guy came running out. He kept saying my best friend got shot," said Daniel Galabya, 21, an intern at a nearby law office on Sutter Avenue told DNAinfo.
“A man screamed, ‘Help, help! They killed my best friend,’” neighbor Krystal Ortiz told the Times. "He was very nervous," Ortiz's mother added. "He had no sneakers on, and he was crying. He said they had locked him in the closet."
According to barber who said he'd cut Curtis's hair on Monday, the man was in the process of "kicking out his roommate, his best friend."
