By JOSEPH KELLARD
In the shooting incident, the victim was with a friend on the corner of Yorktown Street and Allen Avenue in Oceanside at about 10 p.m. when a car drove by and an occupant began firing a BB gun at them, according to police.
³[The boy who was shot in the face] was walking with a friend and a red, four-door vehicle drove alongside them,² said Detective Lt. Kevin Smith of Nassau County police headquarters in Mineola. ³At that point, the boys were looking at the vehicle and someone yelled out, ŒWhat are you looking at?¹ And then he heard several shots being fired from the vehicle and fell to the ground. He realized he was bleeding from the area of his face, ear and neck. It appears he was shot with a BB gun.²
³At first, the car went up the street [northbound on Yorktown] past us and then turned around and came back, passed us and started shooting at us,² said the boy, who was hit in the left cheek. ³I just heard pops and felt things hitting me in the face and head. He let off a lot of rounds, like 10.²
The boy¹s friend, another 15-year-old boy, was hit in the chest with BB pellets but suffered no injuries. The injured boy said he believed the gunman was the passenger, a white male in his late teens or early 20s, wearing a Knicks baseball cap and a gray, hooded sweatshirt. He also said the driver was possibly a female.
The injured boy went to South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceaanside and was treated for wounds to his face, earlobe and neck before being released that night.
The second incident occurred at about 9:50 p.m. on Long Beach Road at Mahland Place, when a male suspect tossed an egg at a 15-year-old boy and then got out of his car and assaulted him, police said. ³The victim had eggs thrown at him, and then he was punched in the face,² said a police spokesperson.
According to the victim¹s father, Andrew Titley, his son was walking on Long Beach Road with a group of about 15 boys when three cars pulled up beside them, and three men got out of one car and approached them. A male suspect punched his son in the face and attacked another boy, as all the other boys in the group fled the scene, Titley claimed.
³These thugs attacked my son,² he said, ³and they broke three bones around his eye. Then they just got back in their car and drove off.²
Titley said that his son and friends claim that someone called his assailant on his cell phone and told him he had just been hit with eggs thrown by a large group of males. While driving around Oceanside, the suspect spotted Titley¹s son and his friends, drove up to them and got out and attacked them, Titley said. ³My son said they had nothing to do with that egg-throwing incident,² Titley said. ³And my son doesn¹t know this person. There is no history between them.²
Titley said that a Fourth Squad detective questioned his son and friends, who identified his assailant as a 19-year-old Oceanside male who graduated from Oceanside High School last year. An arrest has not yet been made in the case.
³There¹s no excuse for this,² Titley said. ³I want the police to make an example of this kid. If this is what 19-year-olds do on Halloween, it¹s appalling.²
Pascale Titley, the victim¹s mother, arrived at the crime scene to take her son to the SNCH emergency room that evening. ³The violence behind this is what¹s scary,² she said.
