A shirtless man whose friend danced exuberantly as they pumped gas at a Brooklyn Mobil station was stabbed to death by a stranger who said the men’s antics were offensive to the killer’s Muslim faith, he said a testimony in the Daily News.
The NYPD is investigating the videotaped killing as a possible hate crime.
The mayhem began when the victim stopped at the Mobil gas station on Coney Island Ave. near Avenue P in Midwood around 11:15 p.m. Saturday, police said. He and his four friends, all shirtless in swimsuits on one of the hottest days of the year, got out of their white sedan to pump gas.
A friend of the victim wearing a tight little trunk that a witness described as “underwear” started dancing.
That’s when a group of men leaving the Mobil station began harassing the 28-year-old victim, dressed in a pink swimsuit, and her friends, according to Summy Ullah, 32, who witnessed the discussion and murder.
“They were like, ‘Oh, we’re Muslims, so don’t do this in front of me,'” Ullah said. “Based on that I think it looks like a hate crime.”
“Nothing else was happening. They were just dancing,” he added. “This guy was dancing in his underwear and the suspect said, ‘Why are you dancing in your underwear?'”
Ullah says he believes the stabber was motivated by homophobia. “Obviously, they’re gay and if they dance that’s their problem,” he said.
One member of the victim’s group approached the men, followed by three others, and they exchanged heated words, according to video obtained by the Daily News.
“You like girls, it looks like you like girls, but we don’t like girls,” Ullah said the victim’s group told the men harassing them. “We have our own life. We can do whatever we want, you know. We are dancing, this is our life”.
Ullah said he convinced both groups to calm down and told everyone to move away, but one of the men harassing the victim’s group continued to use his mobile phone to record the shirtless men as they he cursed as they returned to their car.
This prompted the victim’s group to return to the front of the store to argue some more with the man recording them. Ullah again urged the men to cool down and the man recording the victim left across the parking lot. But the victim chased him and was stabbed by the man who had been recording, according to Ullah.
The video shows the stabbing happened in a split second, with the stunned victim still standing as a crowd gathered around him.
Doctors took the victim, stabbed in the torso, to Maimonides Medical Center, but he could not be saved. His name was not immediately released.
The killer fled on Coney Island Ave. and has not been captured. Ullah believes the suspect and his friends frequent a tobacco shop down the street. Cops were inside the smokehouse investigating hours after the murder, but a man at the smokehouse told a Daily News reporter that the store had no connection to the murder.
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