Juan Morales was watering his tomato plants on his apartment roof when he heard screams coming from below his perch above Jacobus Place in Marble Hill. Moments later, a helicopter buzzed over the neighborhood. Morales, 56, who walks with a cane, made his way down to the street and into what he described as a “terrifying scene.”
“I saw the man bleeding,” Morales said, leaning on his cane outside the Marble Hill-225 St subway station on Friday morning. “The saddest part was seeing the boy sitting there.”
At 4 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, Oscar Belgal, a 28-year-old from the Dominican Republic, had been driving on Marble Hill Avenue with his 5-year-old son in the back seat when immigration authorities attempted to stop and detain him, and, subsequently, an ICE agent shot him in the neck.
The child, who was unharmed, was taken away while NYPD officers carried his father by his armpits and legs to the back seat of a police car and then to a nearby hospital.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, which released a statement on X later that evening, Belgal had previous criminal arrests, including grand larceny, but they offered no explanation for why the ICE officer discharged his weapon.
The shooting inspired rapid backlash from the Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and multiple other city officials. Protesters marched into the night demanding ICE to cease operations in New York.
After only a few hours, Belgal was discharged from NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital and whisked away by ICE officers to New Jersey and then to Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. On Friday, Belgal told his lawyers that the bullet was still lodged in his body, according to attorney Harold Solis of Make the Road New York at a press conference.
A community changed
Earlier that morning, neighbors told Documented how the shooting turned a normally tranquil community into one full of paranoia, anger and fear.
“I hope this doesn’t happen in the neighborhood again,” said Antonia Colón, who has lived in Marble Hill for nine years since migrating from the Dominican Republic. As she sat in a local beauty salon on Friday morning, she said she still felt angry. “I have a grandson who is neurodivergent and had just arrived from school,” she said. “When they [social media] said that the man was killed, he was losing it.”
Colón’s grandson often walks the stretch of West 225th Street where Belgal was shot — he’s a student at John F. Kennedy High School, which is about a two-minute walk away from the scene. Colón recalled blaring police sirens and the whirring sound of helicopter blades above.
“This morning he called me and said ‘Tita, the guy didn’t die, thank God,’” Colón said, shaking her head in disbelief, adding that it was painful that her 14-year-old grandson was telling her about the situation.
“He understands everything that is happening,” Colón said. “They need to be considerate. It does not matter that they have to do their job, but they shouldn’t mistreat people.”
Other residents shared that rumors of ICE knocking on doors of random people were spreading quickly through the neighborhood. Seeing masked federal officers walk around the block made some parents reconsider sending their children to school. They said they had to try to explain the situation to their children and teach them how to keep themselves safe from ICE.
“This area … is the best of the Bronx,” said Daniela Payamps, 31, in Spanish as she got her nails done. However, the night before, as federal agents marched in tactical gear down the street, she said that it was like they were in a military camp.
“They seemed like —”
“Robots!” a woman chimed in in Spanish, as she waited near the entrance.
“Exactly — like terrorists,” Payamps concurred, the tension thick in the room.
“On that street is a school, it fills up with kids,” yelled another woman in the back corner in Spanish, voice rising. “What if it had hit someone else? Because the bullet doesn’t ask where it’s going, the bullet flies straight and that’s it!”
‘That man is an animal’
After the shooting, multiple local immigrant New Yorkers told Documented that their thoughts immediately went to Belgal’s young son, especially as they endeavored to explain what had happened to their own children.
Pedro Almarraz, 41, was trapped inside his taqueria — situated less than a block from the shooting — for eight hours as federal authorities canvassed the scene.
Originally from Sinaloa, Mexico, Almarraz told Documented that he had witnessed the police take Belgal away to the hospital. Later, he said he had to explain to his teenage son to be careful, because they, too, could be targeted just for who they were.
“He called me and asked me if I was ok, what happened,” he said in Spanish. “I told him to be careful, to not go outside — that federal agents don’t respect [anyone] … they didn’t even let the police come close [to the scene] when they arrived.”
The morning was sunny on Friday, and the neighborhood was largely quiet, but vestiges of the previous afternoon’s violence remained. Police posted up inside bodegas, and discarded protest signs laid strewn about the street. One piece of paper was trampled on the ground. On it, in a child’s scrawl, were the words: “Why us kids have to wach this. bad ice.”
One woman, Danerys López, was walking south when she stopped to speak with a Documented reporter. The 56-year-old migrated from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. at the age of 20, and has lived in the neighborhood for 34 years.
She told Documented in Spanish that her children were born and grew up in the neighborhood, and that some of her family members continued to live there. She described the neighborhood as a tight-knit community and very peaceful. “If something happens, everyone finds out. Nothing like this has happened before,” López said. “ICE is getting out of control.”
And while she said she understood that they have a job to do, she said they do not need to threaten people with rifles.
“He was intimidating people around him,” she said of ICE officer Brenden Cuni who was seen on a video wearing a neon yellow vest and carrying an automatic rifle. “That man is an animal,” she said. “ICE needs to stop, and if they don’t stop, at least do [the arrests] with more consideration.”
She pointed to where the shooting took place, less than a block from Atmosphere Academy, a middle school located between John F. Kennedy High School and the subway. “You don’t need to do it in the neighborhood where there are two schools,” she said. “There is a day care for babies.”
Throughout the afternoon, city employees from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA) were in the area giving out flyers with information about their free legal services and red know-your-rights cards. Other volunteers were also distributing flyers for a Bronx ICE Alert rapid response WhatsApp channel.
López said the super from her building is from Puerto Rico and that he wore a hat with the Dominican flag yesterday so that he could run into ICE agents. “I hope they grab me,” she said he told her. “The people are very mad.”
