A man was fatally shot on his way to work last Wednesday in the same Brooklyn subway station through which his older brother, an MTA train operator, drives every day.
Just before 11:15 p.m. on Sept. 4, Freddie Weston, 47, was on his way to work when he killed by a shot to the head inside the Rockaway Ave. station for the C line in Brownsville, police said.
“I’m a train operator, and I have to pull my train into the station where it happened and that’s really a hard pill for me. That’s really a hard pill for me,” Weston’s older brother, Derrick Weston, told the Daily News.
“Just pulling into the station knowing that this is where my brother lost his life is just, is a really hard pill for me. And I just say, I have to pray. I have to pray. I have to pray,” the distraught brother said.
Freddie Weston, a father to a young adult son and twin daughters, was on his way to work the night shift at a grocery store when he was gunned down, according to his brother and a neighbor.
He had recently moved back to the city from Binghamton, N.Y., and was living with his girlfriend in an apartment on Sterling Place, about a mile from where he was shot, the neighbor told the New York Times.
The stunning nature of Weston’s death has now left his family and friends searching for answers.
“It caught us as so unbelievable because he’s not the type of person to bring this type of thing upon himself. He just wasn’t that guy,” his older brother insisted.
“Everybody’s just really devastated because he’s the youngest and … for it to be what they said it is, somebody came in the train station and shot him in the head, that’s not what you do to somebody like him” his brother said, noting the deadly ambush seemed targeted.
According to police, a subway clerk heard the gunfire blast and called 911. EMTs rushed Weston to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, but he could not be saved.
“You can tell it was intended,” Derrick Weston said. “He was on his way to work. He was, to my understanding, he was buying a metro card and I don’t know if the person came up behind him and shot him or they came in front of him and shot him, but they can’t say that’s random. That’s real personal.”
Weston’s neighbor Michelle Mitchell, 56, told the Times Freddie Weston had “no enemies who wanted to see him hurt.”
Though Weston’s brother said it was understandable why people might make assumptions about his brother, those assumptions don’t reflect reality.
“A lot of time when you hear stories like this, the first thing you think is, well, what was he doing? What was he into?” he said. “You thinking something bad about him doesn’t offend me because you don’t know him.”
“I knew him. He was my baby brother. He was a good guy. I could take him anywhere. He didn’t drink or get into fights. He wasn’t abusive. He wasn’t a bad guy.”
Freddie Weston was the youngest of seven siblings. His older brother called him “Young June.”
“He’s Freddie, Jr. My father was Freddie Johnson, Sr.,” his brother said. “He’s the youngest. He’s the baby boy.”
In addition to being a loving father, brother and son, Freddie Weston was a fanatical sports fan whose favorite team was the Mets, his brother recounted, adding he had recently started a new job at a grocery store.
“He’s a huge sports fan,” Derrick Weston said. “He could tell you any sports stats, but he was a very big Mets fan. I’ve been talking with his son. His son is really devastated. He’s really hurt, really heartbroken.”
Freddie Weston had been in trouble in the past; he was arrested in 2021 for weapon possession, according to police. Before that, his last arrest was in 2013. All were minor offenses for which he never served jail time, his brother said, adding nothing he did could justify or reasonably lead to his slaying.
“Nothing that happened to him has anything to do with his past,” his brother said. “Regardless of the little mix-ups he had in the past, he was never a street person. He was always the life of the party, the guy with the jokes. Making people laugh.”
“I want you to know what you all don’t know,” the brother said. “His criminal record is public record, so you know that. What you don’t know is he was a Mets fan. You don’t know that he was into sports. You don’t know that he worked at Whole Foods. You don’t know that he really loved his family. He really loved his friends. You don’t know that about him so I want you to know.”
“To me, it doesn’t diminish his memory or anything because people are going to gather whatever they gather. We know the truth,” his brother said. “This is why I don’t have a problem talking.”
When their sister called to tell Derrick their brother had died, he said he initially didn’t believe her.
“When they said, Junior, I’m like, Junior, who?” his brother recalled. “She’s like, they killed Junior last night. I was like, Junior, who? She was like, our brother. I was like, no. I was in disbelief.”
Mitchell, Weston’s neighbor, told the Times that Freddie Weston was a man who loved his girlfriend and was excited to start his new job, where he was headed when he was shot. “He was so happy to get that job,” she said. “That was his start.”
She last saw him the morning he died, when she said he was grinning from ear to ear after working a shift at the grocery store job for which he had interviewed two weeks before. She often saw Weston holding hands with his girlfriend while the two walked a small white dog that was frequently dyed in shades of red and pink.
The case is still under investigation, the police said, and there have been no arrests.
Weston’s family wants justice.
“I want the person who did it locked up,” his brother said.
“I think it’s better to lock him away because, one, you took somebody’s life so you don’t deserve to walk on the streets,” he told the News. “I don’t think you should lose your life, but you should definitely be locked away so you can deal with what you did and when you are sitting in your jail cell on year number 10 with 15 more years to go, you start to think about, ‘I didn’t really have to do that.’ And that’s what I want. That’s what my family wants.”
As of Sunday, there had been seven murders in the city subway system, up from five for the same time period last year.