Police Make Arrest In Killing Of Queens Grandmother
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Police have arrested a suspect in the killing of a 71-year-old Queens grandmother, who was shot last month when she answered her door in the middle of the night.
Julian Douglas, 22, has been charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon, police announced Saturday.
Leta Webb was shot in the head and left arm at around 1:30 a.m. on March 31 in a building on 119th Avenue at 153rd Street in South Jamaica, police said. She died a few hours later at Jamaica Hospital.
Her son-in-law, Kevin McDowell, also lives in the home and saw the whole thing.
"I was sleeping, and I heard a knock on the door. But it was like a frantic knocking, like, you know, 'I've got to get in the house,'" McDowell said last month. "So I was saying, 'Who is knocking on the door like that at 1 in the morning?' and then I heard the gunshots – about four or five shots — and we came downstairs, and she was there, laying right there on the porch in a pool of blood."
The gunmen had fled.
Webb's daughter, Eva Usher, said she does not believe her mother was targeted, but she believes her house was.
"There was too much trouble coming to the house," Usher said. "She had kids that she had adopted, and they get in trouble, and other people come there and they get mad at you, and they retaliated on my mother. That's what it is. It could've been anybody that opened the door. It just happened to be her."
Usher said gang activity had spilled over into her mother's home.
"It has something to do with Bloods and Crips because she adopted a boy, and he's in jail for murder. He had problems," Usher told 1010 WINS' Glenn Schuck last month. "I think this is a retaliation. ... That was a hit, and I knew something like this was going to happen from all the things that happened here before."
