A Shootout in Carnarsie
9th February 2025
We do not know why the initial gunshot was fired — robbery? assault? just another Friday night in Canarsie? — but it so happened that at least four cops were within earshot of this incident, and considering how it played out, the suspect is lucky he didn’t get shot dead. Where I come from, you point a gun at a cop, let alone four cops, and you’re likely to die in the proverbial “hail of police gunfire.” What kind of place is this, where gunfire goes off randomly on a Friday night and the perp thinks it’s a smart idea to point his gun at cops? That’s how my curiosity about Canarsie got started; the description included a street address — 754 East 80th Street — and I was able to do a Google “street view,” which showed a pleasant-looking tree-lined street, with brick apartments or rowhouses.
Just looking at it, you wouldn’t think of East 80th Street as “ghetto,” and in terms of its physical appearance, this Canarsie neighborhood probably hasn’t changed much since the days when, as Wikipedia says, it was “a largely Italian American and Jewish suburb.” Alas, the Jews and Italians cleared out decades ago because of a school-zone dispute, and the more recent “gentrification” that turned neighborhoods like Park Slope into hot spots for yuppies never got as far east as 80th Street. OK, so who is this suspect walking around with a pistol? “Moonra Durham” is a sufficiently unique name that I figured it was worth a Google search.
Moonra Durham is a registered sex offender who was convicted of first degree sexual abuse in 2013. Details of his full criminal history were not available, but the fact that a registered sex offender armed with a pistol was just strolling through Canarsie on a Friday night — well, that would be scary, if you happened to be in Canarsie, but my advice is to stay the hell away from there. The New York Times published an interactive map of the 2024 presidential election, which allows you to search results down to the precinct level, and in this particular part of Canarsie, the results were Kamala Harris 93%, Donald Trump 6%. This neighborhood is part of New York’s 8th Congressional District, represented in Congress by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who won reelection last year with 75% of the vote.