Off duty NYC security guard shot to death in drive-by
Far Rockaway Queens NY Aug 31 2020
He wanted out of the projects — but instead he died there, leaving behind a dream of raising his three young boys in the open spaces of Pennsylvania.
Kenneth Carmichael, 30, was just back from a weekend trip to Dutch Wonderland, an amusement park in Lancaster County, Pa. with his sons, a 7-year-old and twin 5-year-olds.
“Looking at all the land out there, he was amazed,” recalled the boys’ mother, Joy Stevens, 31.
“He said, ‘This is how I want my son(s) to grow up. I want them to play in a back yard.’ … All he wanted was the best for his kids.”
One reason for the weekend trip was to see if the boys liked Pennsylvania.
“He wanted to move his sons out of the ’hood. He wanted them to move as soon as possible,” Stevens said.
After he got back home to the Redfern Houses in Far Rockaway on Monday night, he helped Stevens — his ex — with their sons’ bags.
“Then he went to get something to eat,” Stevens said.
Carmichael and his current girlfriend were outside the Redfern Houses, on Redfern Ave. and Hassock St. at around 10:30 p.m. when gunfire went off.
“They started running, and he got hit,” Stevens said.
“From what I understand he was the intended target — but I don’t know who, why or anything.
“It just sucks. No one wants to talk or say anything, but everybody nows. One of those situations.”
He was blasted twice in the chest. Medics rushed him to Jamaica Hospital, but he could not be saved.
Carmichael fell at the same spot where ex-con Ernest Thomas, also 30, was gunned down June 5. Thomas was a member of the Hassock Boys, a subset of the Crips street gang that operates in Far Rockaway, said police.
Queens detectives had arrested him for murder in 2011 for a fatal shooting in the Rockaways in 2009, cops said. He was convicted of assault and released on parole in 2017 after serving six years in prison.
Stevens said Thomas and Carmichael were friends, but she doubted Carmichael’s murder was related.
“I don’t think it was the same person, but it all stems from petty beefs,” she said.
Carmichael was a security guard at the Saratoga women’s shelter. He also managed a hiphop group and had starred a clothing brand, dubbed “Take Risk.”
“He was a great father, he was awesome. He was funny, he was just all about his sons, his three sons,” Stevens said. “He was changing his life around.
“He had a past — he grew up in the streets running around with the foolishness — but he started growing up.”
Carmichael despised living in the Redfern Houses, a set of low-slung NYCHA buildings long a flashpoint for violent crime. He told Stevens he sometimes had a feeling of dread.
“He just wanted to get away. He said it — ‘I hate Redfern,’” she said. “It was just getting old to him. He wanted to do different. He wanted to travel.”
Stevens said Carmichael wasn’t involved with a gang, as cops have suggested.
“It’s this part of the projects vs. another part of the projects,” she said. “My baby father [Carmichael] was going as Crip, but that was ten years ago.
“He don’t claim Crip, don’t put Crip up, none of that anymore.”
An old friend of Carmichael’s, who declined to give his name, echoed Stevens in saying he was pulling his life together.
But Redfern, he said, has a way of derailing dreams.
“Living in the projects — that’s really become a project,’ he said. “We stuck so close that one little thing, an accident, can create a lifetime of beef and anger. Some people might get mad at you just looking at them.”
Stevens now wants to keep their sons as lose to Carmichael’s family as possible — but she also wants to move with them to Pennsylvania with them for their safety, and in their dad’s memory.
Stevens said she wants Carmichael’s killer behind bars.
“Some people get all angry and like, ‘street justice,’” she said. “No, I don’t want revenge. But let him sit in jail for the rest of his life and think about what he did.”
