By Michelle Han
A 21-year-old Jamaica man with hopes of earning a high school diploma was shot dead early Tuesday morning in the eastern stretches of Richmond Hill, police said.
Hours later, an unidentified 51-year-old man was found dead a few miles away, across the Van Wyck Expressway in South Jamaica. Police said it was not clear whether the two deaths were related.
On Wednesday, police from the 102nd Precinct arrested 21-year-old Clyde Mottley of 102-26 Van Wyck Expressway and he was charged with second-degree murder, said Officer Charles Larkin, a police spokesman.
The victim, Ronald Beepat, whose mother said he lived in an apartment in Jamaica with three sisters, was shot in the head three times at about 1:20 a.m. Tuesday, said John Buthorn, a police department spokesman. Beepat was taken to Jamaica Hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly later, police said.
The shooting took place in front of 102-15 134th St., a residential neighborhood close to the Van Wyck Expressway in eastern Richmond Hill once known as a crime-ridden neighborhood before a citywide decline in crime began in the early 1990s.
Last month, a 14-year-old girl was raped and shot dead in a house on 95th Avenue, just blocks from where Tuesday
