A Brooklyn gang member will spend 35 years behind bars for gunning down a former federal witness because she beat up their gang’s leader in a beef over fireworks.
Quintin Green, 24, and a second member of the Ninedees Gang murdered Shatavia Walls at the behest of their gang boss Maliek Miller, on July 7, 2020.
Walls, who testified in a federal trial after she was shot in 2017, wanted to make peace with Miller after the 2020 Fourth of July confrontation, but the gang leader wouldn’t have it, telling his crew, “F— her. She’s a rat.”
Brooklyn Federal Court Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall sentenced Green Wednesday, though the length of his term was set in stone because of the type of plea deal negotiated between prosecutors and his lawyers.
“He was the shooter that pursued her, chased her down, knocked her down with his shots,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Dean said Wednesday, pointing out that Green wrote a Facebook post declaring Walls’ killing the work of the Ninedees gang.
Walls, 33, was caught in the middle of a decadelong gang beef in East New York’s Pink Houses, where the Ninedees and their allies controlled buildings Nos. 5 and 6, and the Makk Balla Brims ran buildings Nos. 7 and 8. Her husband was a high-ranking Brims member.
After Walls was shot in 2017 by members of the Loopy Gang, she testified against her shooter — and she was forever labeled a “rat” after that.
Fast-forward to July 4, 2020, when Walls and Miller, the Ninedees leader, got into a fight over fireworks at the housing complex. She got the better of Miller and his cousin in the scrap, and for that, she had to die.
Green attended several meetings planning out Walls’ killing, and on the day of the murder, he and another gang member, Joe Santana, were the crew’s “designated shooters,” according to court documents.
They caught her walking alone on an outdoor path that night and flanked her — Green sprayed bullets at her and chased her toward Santana. Green dropped her to the ground with his shots, and kept on shooting her after she fell.
Miller was convicted of racketeering and murder in aid of racketeering last June.
Green and Santana, who were 19 and 16 at the time of the shooting, both took plea deals before Miller’s trial.
NYCHA Pink Houses
Gardiner Anderson/for New York Daily News Police investigate a shooting in a courtyard of the NYCHA Pink Houses on Loring Ave. in Brooklyn on July 7, 2020. (Gardiner Anderson for New York Daily News)
Green’s lawyer, John Burke, highlighted how abuse and instability in his childhood led him to idolize gang members and join a gang as a young teenager. He was born to a 14-year-old mother who went on to have three more daughters, then lost custody, regained it, and lost it again.
Green was living with extended family in North Carolina, then lived in a domestic violence shelter and a homeless shelter when her mother regained custody, then was placed into foster care before living with a cousin whose sons were gangbangers.
“His life is something out of a Dickens novel, but it’s worse,” Burke said.
Green told the judge he was “deeply sorry” for the shooting, saying, “I want the family to know that I know what I did was unacceptable. I had no right to do what I did,” he said. “I chose to be in a gang, which put me in this courtroom today.”
Hall said she believed Green’s remorse to be genuine, but added, “You were a young man, yes, but the choice you made is one that no one can walk away from. … You’re not allowed to take a life and continue to waste yours.”
John Durham, interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said, “Quintin Green shot an unarmed woman in cold blood to make a name for himself in the gang, but he should be called out for what he truly is, a cowardly killer. He deservedly will spend decades in a federal prison.”
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