BY THE VILLAGE SUN | Police have made an arrest in connection with the slaying of Eliahs Brazoban, 18, this past summer.
Jonathan Morales, 36, who lives in the Baruch Houses at 525 F.D.R. Drive, just north of Delancey Street, was arrested Fri., Sept. 22, around 6 a.m. and charged with murder. A police spokesperson said, according to a police report, the motive for the killing is unknown.
The victim was shot once in the neck outside the Rivington Food deli, at the corner of Rivington and Pitt Streets, on Sat., June 24, going into Sun., June 25, right around midnight. Responding police found him with a single gunshot wound to the neck. He was declared dead at New York-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital.
Like the alleged gunman, Brazoban lived in the Baruch Houses, too, at 555 F.D.R. Drive, the neighboring building just to the north of Morales’s.
His grieving father-in-law, Isaac Valerio, previously declared to The Village Sun that the teen had been “executed” — yet another victim of senseless youth gun violence.
“It’s just a neighborhood thing,” Valerio said. “It’s my neighborhood against your neighborhood — and we’re gonna kill someone and then we’re going to rap about it on YouTube.”
Brazoban had had some run-ins with the law in the past. But he was trying to turn his life around through Avenues for Justice, an East Village-based, alternatives-to-incarceration program, when he was fatally shot.
What a tragedy. It’s especially sad when a person is turning his life around. What garbage must have been going through the mind of the man who killed him? For shame!