A member of the Coast Guard was recently convicted in the fatal shooting of a 22-year-old Astoria man who was on the run from the city because he believed someone was going to kill him.
Prosecutors said Kalif Canady was packing his black 2000 Denali for a move to North Carolina with his girlfriend and her child when shots rang out at about 1:15 a.m. on Feb. 20, 2010, in the parking lot of the Astoria Houses.
As his horrified girlfriend looked on, Canady was struck twice in the head and collapsed in a pool of blood—surrounded by the luggage he was loading into the Denali, prosecutors said.
Marcus Ayala, 22, of Brooklyn, was on active duty with the U.S. Coast Guard in Virginia at the time of the murder, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said.
Ayala believed Canady was responsible for the 2009 murder of his cousin, Daud Abdul-Hakim and decided to take matters into his own hands, law enforcement sources said.
Ayala rented a car and told friends at his Coast Guard base that he was leaving to “find his cousin’s killer”, prosecutors said.
Canady, who had a record of arrests for weapons possession and possession of marijuana, was a person of interest at the time of his murder, in a fatal shooting in Ayala’s East New York neighborhood, law enforcement sources said.
“He felt something might happen,” family members said. “He had a feeling and packed his bags to go and live with his mother in North Carolina, leaving all this craziness behind.
“He never made it out of the parking lot,” family members said. “Just a few minutes and he would have been out of here.”
Ayala is facing life in prison when he is sentenced on June 6, Brown said.
—Liz Goff