In Brooklyn Apartment, Four Shot Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide

NEW YORK — Four members of a Brooklyn family, including a toddler and a teenage boy, were found shot to death early Wednesday morning, their bodies scattered throughout a three-bedroom apartment along with bullet casings and a gun, in what police said appeared to be a triple murder-suicide.

The toddler’s grandmother returned home to her Brownsville apartment around 5 a.m. and called 911 after discovering the bodies. They all had gunshot wounds to the head.

Detectives’ leading theory was that the gunman was the toddler’s 27-year-old father, Terrance Briggs, whose body was found between a bed and a wall in the same room as his young daughter, Laylay Briggs, 1.

The grandmother found the door locked when she arrived, and there were no signs of a forced entry, police said.

But police officials said that any possible motive was not yet clear, and detectives would need to perform a detailed crime scene review, a detailed forensic review of the wounds and interviews with relatives and neighbors before piecing together what happened.

The body of Briggs’ stepfather, identified by police as Loyd Drain Jr., 57, was found in the bathroom. And the body of Drain’s son, identified by his school as Loyed Drain III, 16, was found in a back bedroom.

They were all pronounced dead at the scene, a fourth-floor apartment that is part of the Riverdale Osborne Towers, a high-rise complex in the Brownsville neighborhood.

The shootings, discovered on a day students were holding nationwide protests over gun violence, underscored the heightened risk of deadly domestic violence in situations with a gun. The police had been called to the Brownsville apartment multiple times for domestic incidents in the past, a spokesman said, though it was not clear who the target of those complaints was or how they were resolved.

Domestic murders fell last year in New York City, to 49 from 63 the year before, and police officials said fewer than 10 of the killings last year were by gunfire.

In the early hours of the Brownsville case, detectives were looking for the gun under Briggs’ body, having determined that there was no gun near the other family members. But they were cautious at first about moving Briggs’ body, and police officials declined to answer questions later about where detectives ultimately found the gun.

“There’s reasons we can’t say,” Deputy Chief Michael Kemper, the commanding officer of Brooklyn North detectives, told a reporter.

The shell casings appeared to come from .40-caliber bullets, the police said.

Relatives and friends of the family, gathering to grieve at another home in Brooklyn, declined to speak about what happened, and much was still unclear about what led up to the shootings — and even when precisely they happened.

Some neighbors said the family argued, particularly Briggs and his stepfather, Drain, but they said nothing ever raised an alarm. Some neighbors also said Briggs was known to be troubled. He particularly liked to play the first-person shooter video game “Call of Duty” on his PlayStation, one person said.

Still, other neighbors said the family was friendly and welcoming.

“This is a shocking thing to me,” said James Walker, who lived on the opposite end of the floor from the family. “They were friendly people — nothing bad about them.”

The elder Drain, who went by “Big Daddy,” held cookouts across from the complex on the outskirts of Nehemiah Park. He used to sit by an old blue van of his, grilling and holding forth with neighbors.

“He would be there all summer long feeding everybody’s kids,” said Kathy Lindo, who lives down the hall from the family.

The younger Drain, a junior at Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was taking five Advanced Placement classes in calculus, English, environmental science, U.S. history and research and communication. He was also a student leader of the school’s cooking club, said Barbara Martinez, a school spokeswoman.

A friend said he used to play third base for a summer baseball team, the Brooklyn Bombers, and also excelled at basketball.

“Our school community is devastated by this senseless loss of human life,” Martinez said. “We are grieving and ensuring that our students and staff have access to counseling at this difficult time.”

Lindo said she was puzzled she did not hear any gunshots Wednesday morning. The first hint something was wrong was when her husband looked out the window and saw police going in and out of the building. Then she looked down and saw the grandmother, Patricia Green, being helped out by police.

“She could barely walk,” Lindo said.

All morning, police investigators and crime scene technicians, some of them dressed in protective clothing and carrying plastic sheeting, went in and out of the heavily gated apartment complex, a ring of nine-story buildings around a courtyard. Residents poured out into the cold in a steady rush-hour stream, on their way to work or to take children to school and day care.

The shootings sent waves of grief through the area.

“In the nature of this business, we deal with death and tragic scenes,” said Assistant Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the commanding officer of Brooklyn North, “but when it involves an infant it’s extremely tough.”

In the afternoon, crime scene technicians emerged from the back of the building, one of them cradling the body of the toddler in a bag and others rolling out another body on a stretcher.