Inside a Brooklyn gang war: How one teen’s death sparked a bloody, years-long battle

A Brooklyn indictment offers a rare and detailed look into how a gang war exploded from the killing of one teen into a cascade of escalating tension that played out over several years in music videos, social media posts and bloody confrontations on the streets.

Two allied Bloods crews, the 59 Brims and the Bloodhound Brims, had long battled with their rivals as they held onto turf in Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island. But the April 29, 2021, shooting of Davonte Lewis, 17, outside his high school in Midwood, supercharged their beef against Folk Nation and other gangs, according to prosecutors.

Davonte, who went by the nickname “Dior,” was a member of the Bloodhound Brims, prosecutors said, and his teenage accused shooters are facing trial next month. Indictment documents against 14 reputed Brims members lay out several examples of how the gang’s members pledged to avenge Davonte’s death.

The gang members called their hunt for Folk Nation members “Drenching for Dior,” according to the indictment, and on May 1, 2021, just two days after Davonte’s killing, one of the members, Jaquell Scales, indicated on Facebook he was itching for violence.

“I love you baby bro,” he posted in a caption showing himself and two other suspects in the case showing gang hand signs.

“The celebration over I’m outside……DRENCHIN4DIOR.”

The next day, another person in that photo, Karon Evans, ventured into Folk Nation territory in East Flatbush and shot and wounded a rival gang member, prosecutors say.

Scales and Evans, who go by the names “Bully Hound” and “Kenzo Hound,” celebrated the excursion into enemy territory with a May 20 drill rap video on YouTube called “Trip 2 the Kirk,” an apparent reference to the gang’s activity in Folk Nation turf around Newkirk Ave., prosecutors said.

Evans is being held on $300,000 bail after pleading not guilty to conspiracy, attempted murder, assault and multiple weapons charges. Scales is currently in state prison on a 2024 weapons case out of Brooklyn.

Davonte’s mother, Carlene Watts, vehemently denies her son was involved in a gang and she called the D.A.’s remarks that his death fueled a gang war “despicable.”

“They are trying to make my son a scapegoat,” Watt told the Daily News. “They are exploiting my son’s case for their own benefit.“

The teens who shot him did so out of simple jealousy, Watt maintains.

“My son had a good mother and a good grandmother. I have a good job. He had a lot of things that these kids didn’t,” she said. “They were mad…. They just didn’t respect it.”

The gang members used Davonte’s nickname as a rallying cry for years in music videos and social media post, prosecutors say. They called a group chat “D4D”, short for “Drenching for Dior,” and put out a music video titled with that same acronym, according to the indictment.

Two Brims members involved in the ongoing clash are accused of murder.

Ron “Reko” Thomas, 22, who appears in the “Trip 2 the Kirk” video, and Tashawn “Ty Prime” Ware, 19, executed a rival from the Folk Nation gang on Halloween 2022, according to prosecutors.

But prosecutors said Thomas and Ware didn’t have to stray from their territory to kill Jamel Nicholson. He came to them.

Nicholson, an up-and-coming drill rapper who went by Melly Gzz, was dating a Brims member’s ex-girlfriend and was visiting her at the Nostrand Houses in Sheepshead Bay when he walked into an ambush, Brooklyn D.A. Eric Gonzalez said.

“So he’s a member of a rival gang dating a woman in Bloods territory,” Gonzalez said.

Thomas and Ware showed up as Nicholson and his girlfriend left their building and video shows the couple running for their lives as the two masked gunman open fire.

Nicholson was killed, while his girlfriend suffered wounds that left her hospitalized for weeks. The girlfriend’s mother told the News in 2022 that she needed to be hooked up to a ventilator, and had surgery to her abdomen.

The accused killers then moved to Vermont, where Thomas was involved in two separate police pursuits last year, one of which left two of their fellow young New Yorkers dead on the road, police there say. Ware and Thomas are now both locked up in Vermont awaiting extradition and indictment on conspiracy, murder and other charges.

Meanwhile, the gang war in Brooklyn raged on, with more taunts on Instagram, and bullets flying in Sheepshead Bay and Canarsie as recently as October.

Still, the Brooklyn D.A. has pointed out in press statements, gun violence and murders have dropped across the borough, with 287 shootings last year, a sharp drop from 338 in 2023, and 449 in 2022.

Gonzalez credits the drop in part to a string of gang takedowns.

“There’s really a small handful of people in every part of our borough who are the shooters and the real significant drivers of violence,” he said. “If we can identify them and target those individuals, we can see tremendous decreases in gun violence, and that’s what we’ve been doing.”

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