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Residents Try to Make Sense of Fatal Shooting in Cypress Hills

"It's terrible," said Cypress Hills resident Jose Nagar, 71. "If you think about these things too much you go crazy."

“It’s terrible,” said Cypress Hills resident Jose Nagar, 71. “If you think about these things too much you go crazy.”

Mala Narine, 39, who has lived in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn since the birth of her 14-year-old son, was spending a sunny Tuesday lunchtime resting on the sofa in her three-bedroom clapboard house on McKinley Avenue, when she heard the shots ring out.

“I ran straight to my kitchen,” Narine said. “It took me a full five minutes before I began to realize what had happened.”

It wasn’t yet one o’clock in the afternoon when Michael Tenorio, a 22-year-old male was shot multiple times, just feet from Narine’s doorstep and less than a minute’s walk from Tenorio’s Lincoln Avenue home.

Police said Tenorio was chased by an assailant. He got as far as the northwest corner of Sheridan and McKinley Avenue, several witnesses said, leaving a trail of blood across the asphalt.

Tenorio collapsed on the sidewalk outside the Bhavaanee Maa Mandir Buddhist Temple on McKinley Avenue, where police discovered him unconscious and unresponsive. An ambulance took Tenorio to Brookdale hospital where he was later pronounced dead.

It was the 8th murder in the 75th precinct so far this year. 21 murders were recorded in 2014.

Chris Joseph, a 28-year-old construction worker, said he watched the drama unfold from the window of his ground floor apartment across the street from where Tenorio died. The gunshots woke his 18-month-old daughter, he said.

“There were kids playing, people walking by,” when the fatal shots were fired Joseph said. “It was lively out here.”

Police confirmed Thursday that detectives are at the preliminary stages of investigating the homicide that is “possibly gang related,” a spokesman said. No arrests have yet been made, police said.

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