A gun-toting career criminal whose stray bullet killed a 53-year-old grandmother working at a Brooklyn construction site has been sentenced to 25 years to life for the senseless killing.
Malik Fryar, 34, was looking for work at a Coney Island job site on Feb. 4, 2019 — the same site where the victim, Dorothy Dixon, 53, had gathered with her fellow laborers with a coalition called Black Economic Survival, prosecutors said at trial.
Fryar had argued with the group a week earlier, telling them he he didn’t want to see them at the site again or else, according to prosecutors.
Officials said when Fryar saw them that day, he pulled up his car at the W. 33rd St. and Neptune Ave. construction site — his wife in the passenger seat — and started looking around his trunk. One of the workers punched him, so he ran, waited a minute, and returned to his car — then took a gun out of his trunk and fired three shots at the crowd, prosecutors said.
One of those shots hit Dixon in the chest, fatally wounding her. Another shot hit another worker in the foot.
Fryar’s wife had moved to the driver’s seat, drove away from the scene while Fryar ran home, prosecutors said. Police found the car abandoned about five miles away in Brighton Beach about a month later.
Fryar went on the run, and cops found him more than five months later in a Lower East Side apartment, trying to escape through an air conditioner duct, officials said.
He was convicted of second-degree murder last month after a jury trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Justice Phyllis Chu hit him with the 25-to-life sentence Thursday.
“My mom didn’t deserve what happened to her. He deserved everything he got,” Dixon’s daughter, Minnie Scott, told the Daily News on Thursday. “I miss my mom every day. It’s been a long six years. I’ve been waiting for this every day. I’m happy that justice is served.”
Dixon started working construction about a decade earlier. Before she left work the morning of the murder, she told Scott she’d cook up a meal of pork chops and gravy for her then 7-year-old granddaughter, who was feeling sick.
“This was a senseless act of violence that took the life of a hardworking woman, devastating her family. Dorothy Dixon was a mother of six and grandmother of many more who was just trying to earn a living when her life was viciously cut short,” Brooklyn D.A. Eric Gonzalez said. ” Gun violence is now at record lows in Brooklyn and my office is committed to further driving down shootings and holding people such as this defendant responsible for their actions.”
Fryar, who was 27 at the time of the shooting, has a criminal record dating to at least 2012 that includes convictions for drug dealing, attempted possession of a forged instrument and attempted assault for his role in a non-fatal shooting.
