The widow of slain Gov. Andrew Cuomo aide Carey Gabay sat tearfully in Brooklyn court Monday as she listened to prosecutors recount the 2015 gang shootout that killed her husband.
Trenelle Gabay, 40, audibly exhaled the first time prosecutor Olatokunbo Olaniyan uttered her late husband’s name during closing arguments in the horrific case, which involves four defendants.
Carey Gabay, a lawyer for Cuomo’s Empire State Development, was shot in the head in the packed streets of Crown Heights while out with his brother celebrating the Caribbean festival J’Ouvert. He died two weeks later after being taken off life support.
Trenelle, who sat with Gabay’s siblings, became pregnant with her 43-year-old dead husband’s baby last year thanks to doctors harvesting his sperm just before he died.
Olaniyan told jurors that suspect Kenny Bazille — who has a separate jury hearing in his case, since he is the only one arguing self-defense — “knew there were hundreds of people who were walking in the street” when he started squeezing off rounds at rival gangbangers that night.
“He wasn’t firing because he had to. He was firing because he wanted to,” she said of Bazille, an admitted Folk Nation member.
During the 3-month-long trial, prosecutors have argued that the Sept. 7, 2015, crossfire was the result of rising tensions between various sects of the Folk Nations and Crips gangs, which led to a call for gangwide warfare that required members to “shoot on sight.”
Carey GabayReuters“[Bazille] knew one of his bullets could bounce off of buildings, could go through walls, could go into businesses, could ruin people’s lives,” the prosecutor said. “But he wasn’t acting alone, he wasn’t an innocent bystander. He was a soldier in the war.”
Bazille’s lawyer, Sam Karliner, said his 32-year-old client simply whipped out his gun when he became “cornered.”
“Kenny might not come off as someone you want to invite over for dinner,” the lawyer said. “But that doesn’t prove he’s part of a gang war.”
Summations in the case of the other alleged shooters, Micah Alleyne, Tyshawn Crawford and Keith Luncheon, are scheduled for Wednesday.
All four men face up to life behind bars if convicted of murder and other charges.
