What started as a sunny afternoon in Brooklyn ended in senseless violence, bloodshed, and death–over hair weave.
Twenty one year old Dennzel Holder is now on trial for the August 2011 murder of Shawn Williams.
He has been charged with second degree murder.
Williams was shot twice in the back and left on the street to die after a Brooklyn brawl over hair weave.
“If it was not such a tragic incident, we would probably laugh about it because it’s so pathetic,” Assistant District Attorney Edward Purce began in his opening statement to the jury.
Williams, his sister Tiara Haynes, and his girlfriend Sheniqua Cunningham were walking along Nostrand Ave in the Crown Heights area when they passed a trio of teens, one of whom said “My boyfriend wouldn’t let me walk out of the house looking like that.”
Cunningham, who was walking a few steps in front of her boyfriend, took offense at the slight, believing it was aimed at her.
“She didn’t look as glamorous, I guess, so she thought they were making fun of her,” Haynes recalled.
Within moments, all hell broke loose, and all five young women were locked into combat, brawling on the sidewalk.
At one point, a bottle was thrown.
Williams stepped in to break up the fight and the situation seemed as if it was over–until Shatasia Meggett summoned her boyfriend, Holder. Holder arrived on the scene at the same time as another girl’s cousin, sparking a second round of violence that ultimately ended Shawn’s young life, “because two groups of young women were fighting about a hair weave,” the prosecutor said in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
The victim’s father, Leonard Saunders, told the Daily News he was confident his son’s killer would be convicted.
“I’ve seen some of the videotape of what transpired,” he said. “I was wondering how the hell at around 3:40 in the afternoon somebody would come out with a gun in broad daylight with little kids running down the street, walking with their parents.”
To say that this is a damn shame is an understatement. A young man dead, over hair that used to be on a horse.
We’ve really got to do better.
April Dawn (@scarlettsinatra)
