BY JACOB KAYE
A Brooklyn man has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after a 2016 Astoria shooting over an insult led to a man’s death, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced on Friday.
A jury found Santiago Salcedo, a 27-year-old from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, guilty of manslaughter in the first degree, attempted assault in the first degree and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree after a five-week trial in December 2019, according to the DA.
On Thursday, Feb. 7, Salcedo was sentenced to 20 years in prison for manslaughter, plus five years for attempted assault, Katz said. Queens Supreme Court Justice Ronald Hollie also sentenced Salcedo to five years of post release supervision.
According to trail testimony, Salcedo was walking down Steinway Street in Astoria with three friends, two of whom were women, around 4 a.m., on July 17, 2016. The four friends walked by Qsaun Brown and another man, who both began to make derogatory remarks to the two women Salcedo was with, the DA said.
According to trial testimony, one of the women asked Salcedo, “Are you just going to let them disrespect us like that?”
Salcedo and his male friend then went to a car, retrieved something from the trunk and confronted Brown and his acquaintance. The four men began to argue when Brown ran back to his car and drove it towards Salcedo and his friend. Salcedo then grabbed a gun from his friend and shot at Brown five times.
Brown was hit once in the neck by the gunfire and died two days later in a hospital nearby.
“This act of violence could have easily been avoided. An early morning derogatory remark started a chain of events that resulted in one man being killed,” Katz said.
