FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Brooklyn Man Sentenced to 20 Years to Life in Prison
For Fatal Shooting of Innocent Woman in Crown Heights
Victim Shot on Eastern Parkway as Her Son Waited in Her Car
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez today announced that a 37-year-old man has been sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for the 2007 fatal shooting of a 35-year-old woman.
District Attorney Gonzalez said, “This defendant senselessly took the life of an innocent bystander when he engaged in an afternoon gunfight, leaving a young boy without his mother and devastating her family. He has now been held accountable.”
The District Attorney identified the defendant as Darius Dubarry, 37, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He was sentenced today by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Miriam Cyrulnik to 20 years to life in prison. The defendant was convicted of one count of second-degree murder on December 15, 2017 following a jury trial.
The District Attorney said that, according to trial testimony, on December 15, 2007, at approximately 5:30 p.m., the defendant got into a gun battle with Herburtho Benjamin in the vicinity of 390 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. Dubarry fired 10 shots from his 9mm gun and Benjamin fired approximately four shots. Carol Simon was struck once in the abdomen by a bullet from Dubarry’s gun and later died at Kings County Hospital. She had just left her 9-year-old son in a car and was trying to return home to her apartment on Eastern Parkway to retrieve something before taking her son to his swimming lesson when she was shot.
The defendant fled to Augusta, Georgia and was apprehended there by police on December 23, 2007 in a Days Inn motel where he had checked in using a different name.
Dubarry was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009, but the conviction was reversed on appeal. At the same trial, his co-defendant, Benjamin was convicted of second-degree manslaughter.
The case was prosecuted by Senior Assistant District Attorney Olatokunbo Olaniyan, of the District Attorney’s Homicide Bureau, under the supervision of Assistant District Attorney Timothy Gough, Homicide Bureau Chief.
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