A 15-year-old boy was shot to death in the lobby of his Brooklyn apartment building “over a look” that enraged his killer, his mother believes.
Heath Campbell was returning home from school when he and his friends crossed paths with the gunman in the lobby of the Rutland Plaza apartment complex on E. 93rd St. near Rutland Road in East New York around 3:30 p.m. Tuesday.
The killer snarled “What are you looking at?” at the boys before opening fire, striking Heath and a 16-year-old friend, Heath’s mother Joy Smith told the Daily News.
“That’s all I know,” said Smith. “It was over a look.”
After the shooting, police knocked on dozens of doors in the sprawling complex, questioning residents about a robbery that took place in a hallway hours before the gunfire erupted. On Wednesday, NYPD officials said they have not yet established a motive for the shooting.
Police initially said that Heath was struck in the head but doctors at Kings County Hospital, where he died, told his mother he was shot twice in the back.
The other teen was taken to Brookdale University Hospital with a gunshot wound to his right shoulder in stable condition, cops said.
Smith was provided details of the shooting by a friend of her son’s who survived the violence who she met at the murder scene minutes after the gunman opened fire.
The mother said she didn’t hear the shots that killed her son but was drawn to the window of her sixth-floor apartment by a commotion rising up from the street below. When she looked outside Smith saw police cars parked haphazardly and cops rushing into the building.
Realizing it was around the time her son typically gets home from school, she dashed downstairs to make sure he wasn’t caught in the chaos below.
“I thought, ‘Let me just go make sure my son doesn’t have nothing to do with what’s going on downstairs,’” she recalled.
Upon arriving at the scene and realizing someone had been shot, Smith pleaded with police and then a building maintenance worker, who couldn’t tell her whether her son had been hit.
It wasn’t until his friend ran up to her and, using Campbell’s nickname, shouted, “That’s Duddah!” that her worst fears were realized.
“I just started jumping around, like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God. That’s my son,’” Smith recounted. “I’m trying to tell the police officers, ‘That’s my son, that’s my son, I want to go to him,’ but they’re not allowing me to go.”
As Smith fought to reach her son, she spotted his wounded friend standing with his mother and said the teen appeared to be in shock as he nursed his bleeding shoulder.
“I don’t know if it was a jacket or a sweater but he was holding it to [his shoulder],” said Smith. “He was there and shocked. They’re children!”
Smith looked on as paramedics performed CPR on her son, before loading him into an ambulance, she said.
“I just remember he’s on a stretcher and once they got him up the steps they started pumping him. And I don’t think a pump is good,” said Smith. “When I got to the hospital they told me he went into cardiac arrest.”
At the hospital, Smith shared final moments with her slain son.
“I asked the doctor, ‘Can I touch him?’” said the grieving mother. “I was just rubbing his legs, his hands. I was rubbing his feet. I was kissing his face and his forehead.”
Heath was born in Queens Hospital and raised in Woodhaven before he, his older brother Emala Campbell and his mother moved to Brooklyn when he was 14, Smith said.
A beloved high school sophomore, Heath’s teachers at the Brooklyn Institute of Liberal Arts, who had seen him alive and well earlier in the day, flocked to the hospital to console his grieving mother.
“He was good at school. About four or five of his teachers came to the hospital. They brought flowers, they spoke really good of him,” said Smith.
Heath liked playing video games on his PlayStation 4 and shooting hoops at the nearby Lincoln Terrace/Arthur S. Somers Park. He befriended the other wounded teen, another Rutland Plaza resident, shortly after moving to Brooklyn.
“He was a good child,” said Smith. “He was really good.”
Smith described the feeling of losing her child as a gnawing pain in her chest and an emptiness she has only begun to grapple with.
“I don’t know how I feel,” Smith said, speculating she’s still in shock. “He’s not gonna come home no more. He’s gone.”
With Rocco Parascandola
