Police have arrested the gunman who killed a beloved 80-year-old deli worker on Tuesday after getting into an argument with a different employee over the price of a beer, the NYPD and a law enforcement source said.
Mark Thomas, 41, tried to buy a $2 beer with only $1.50, but the clerk at the 797 Deli Grocery on the corner of Stanley Avenue and Ashford Street in East New York turned him away, the source said. Later, Thomas returned, and fired multiple shots at a different worker — 80-year-old Abdulla Yafaee, police said.
Yafaee, of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, was found with a gunshot wound to his chest at about 6:30 p.m., cops said. He was taken to Brookdale Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
“I heard the shots,” said Helen Sellers, 75, who lives behind the store. “I was like, are they shooting firecrackers?”
Sellers said Yafaee was “everybody’s friend.”
“We used to call him Pop,” she said.
Another neighbor, Linda Scott, 53, was crying Wednesday after hearing the news.
“He was a very nice person. It’s very sad,” she said. “Sometimes we would be short for a dollar and he would give us credit.”
Thomas, of Brooklyn, was charged on Thursday with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon, police said.
Tuesday’s shooting was the second deadly crime to take place at the deli.
In January 2014, a worker was hit over the head during a robbery by a former employee, according to police. The worker, Hisham Zidan, 55, suffered a heart attack and was found dead in the store the following morning, cops said.
Raeq Monsour, 58, has been supplying coffee to the store for five years and remembered the deadly robbery.
“[Zidan] was sick, he had high blood pressure. It was a terrible thing to do,” Monsour said.
Police classified Zidan’s death as a homicide and charged two men — Amir Alawadi, 19, and Ahmed Jones, 30 — with murder several days later, according to the NYPD.
