Police have confirmed that a young woman is dead following a shooting inside an apartment building in Brooklyn. The victim was identified as 24-year-old Tatiana Pettis, whose death has prompted a homicide investigation at a residential building on Foster Avenue in the Flatbush section of the borough.
According to a police source, the shooting happened around 11:25 on Tuesday night. Pettis had been shot in the left side of her neck, and she was taken to Kings County Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The killing set off a search for those responsible and an effort to reconstruct what took place inside the apartment.
A police source told News 12 that Pettis's mother was inside the apartment at the time and heard her daughter scream. She found her bleeding and pressed on the wound, and had her son call 911 as she tried to help. That account from within the home has framed the earliest stages of the investigation.
In the immediate aftermath of the gunfire, two people were seen running from the building. Detectives have made those two individuals a focus of the inquiry, working to establish who they are and what role, if any, they played in what happened to the 24-year-old.
At the scene, the aftermath was visible from outside the building. Through a basement-level window, what appeared to be blood could be seen on the floor inside the apartment where police say Pettis was found, an unsettling glimpse of a violent scene in an otherwise ordinary residential block.
As of the latest reports, no one had been arrested, and police said they had not released a description of anyone they were looking for. Officers canvassed the neighbourhood for information and worked the scene as the investigation continued through the day.
Authorities appealed for the public's help, asking anyone with information to contact the New York Police Department's Crime Stoppers hotline. For now, the case stood as the overnight killing of a young woman in her own building, with detectives still seeking to track down the pair who fled and to understand what led to her death.