Coney Island, NY – An 87-year-old Brooklyn grandmother taking an afternoon stroll was killed late yesterday by a stray bullet fired in a wild shootout outside her home, police said.
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Anna (Channa) Surman, a Holocaust survivor, was walking among the flowers planted in the courtyard of the Surfside Houses in Coney Island when shots rang out at 5:40 p.m., police said.
“Me shot, me shot. Someone shot me,” Surman screamed, recalled Neyla Andreyeva, 71, a neighbor.
Bleeding heavily from a wound to her neck, Surman collapsed on the concrete and was taken to Lutheran Medical Center, where she died a short time later.
“She was admiring the flowers,” said stunned neighbor Vladimir Goldenber, 73. “She is almost blind [and] she can’t see much.”
Surman had been a history professor in her native Moscow and was a friendly fixture in a building filled with elderly immigrants from Russia.
She moved to Coney Island about 15 years ago and delighted in receiving visits from her two grown sons and her granddaughter, friends said.
“She was a very sweet lady. She always talked about her family,” Rakhill Losik, 80, said. “This is very sad.”
Though frail, Surman doted on several cats that live in the building and went for walks among the flowers that brighten otherwise bleak concrete.
“She was 87, but she never stopped,” said Andreyeva.
The two gunmen turned to run away after Surman was hit and remain at large.
Investigators swarmed the housing project as the sun went down to interview possible witnesses and hunt for surveillance video that may have captured the shooting.
The motive for the gun battle was not immediately known, but the senseless killing rattled the residents of the Surfside Houses.
“They are now shooting old ladies around here,” said a witness who would only give his name as Sam.
Surman was the latest in a rash of stray bullet victims, including Jesselle Page, 44, who was killed July 10 trying to protect her nephew from gunfire in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Misaskim is working with the Medical Examiners office for the release of the body.
Anyone with information about this crime is urged to call CrimeStoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS. Police have not yet released a description of the suspect.
HY”D from Channa bas Moishe and Freida Surman
horrible!
go Blumberg go
BD”E
Why did they take her to Lutheran Hospital? That’s on the other side of Brooklyn!
why didnt they take here to coney island hspital?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
Boruch dayan emes , to escape the clutches of the SS and be killed in Brooklyn, go freg a kashe
People don’t belive this but they keep on saying crime is down. It’s a fact we have half the police in the force that we had 8 years ago, ask any cop and he/she will tell you it’s true. I think we hear more and more shootings as time go’s by. We believe everything the media is paid to say on all levels. that’s the problem.
We feel so safe when our mayor gos on the Nachum segal show and says his name is Morchai ben Zev” wow” , I’m so proud of him lets vote for him another few times because he is telling us where safe. Drunks back in the streets all over brooklyn, Graffiti all over Brooklyn and the same words and hand writings and no one knows whos doing it . give me a break. words like “Lazar” “DNS” “PAWAR” Have you seen it in your area what dose it mean? whos writing it? huh?
because Lutheran is the closest trauma center
The reason they went to Lutheran is because it is the ONLY trauma center in south brooklyn and the only one that at least gave her a chance to fight and that is Lutheran’s specialty