A heartbroken Brooklyn family is planning a funeral for a 24-year-old man who was slain while celebrating life at a Queens baby shower.
Jefari Dobie was killed Saturday morning when shots rang out inside a commercial space on Atlantic Ave. near 109th St. in South Richmond Hill, according to cops.
They said Dobie was shot once in the chest.
Medics rushed Dobie to Jamaica Hospital, where he died.
Three others were wounded in the melee. It was not immediately clear who was being targeted. There have been no arrests.
Dobie’s aunt, Janet Dawkins, said the family is in the dark about what happened.
“We have no idea, no idea how this could have happened to him,” she told the Daily News. “But the way things are happening now in New York City, with the attacks on people on the subways and, you know, on the street and what not. These folks are out of control.”
Dawkins described her brother’s son as “a good kid” who never got caught up in gangs or street life.
She said Dobie, who lived and grew up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, stayed out of trouble by working in construction with his father, a private contractor.
“He paints with our family,” she said of the victim. “At my parents’ house, they laid down new floors and everything. And Jefari always helped him, worked with him. He started as a teenager. My brother wanted him to know.”
The reality still hasn’t hit the aunt.
“We’re trying to understand why, why?” Dawkins exclaimed. “And especially at a baby shower.”
Dobie’s parents are crushed, she noted.
“They’re trying to get everything together for his service,” the woman said.
“We’ve never had anything like this to happen in our family … and our family has been in New York, my parents from the 1950s. They have since passed away. But we have never had this kind of tragedy in our family.”
She described her nephew’s death as senseless.
“When I saw on the news how the the place was riddled with bullets – it doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. He’s not a street child. There’s no reason for it.”
The victims included a 26-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his right arm and a 45-year-old man shot once in the left leg, according to law enforcement.
The other two victims were taken to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Queens in stable condition, according to police.
A fourth victim, a 43-year-old man, made his own way to Jamaica Hospital with two gunshot wounds to his right arm and one to his left leg and was listed in stable condition, according to police.
