By Brendan O’Reilly
Police tape surrounded the sidewalk outside of the Image Bar and Lounge Saturday morning. An anti-gang activist was shot down after leaving the bar in the early hours of Oct. 21.
Hykiem Coney, 24, of Roosevelt, was walking southbound on Gilroy Avenue from Hempstead Turnpike when he was shot, according to a Nassau County Police Department news release. There are no suspects in the case, and the officers on the scene could not determine if there was more than one gunman.
Coney was transported to the Nassau University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead the next day. His body was being kept alive, however, for the possibility of organ donation.
Coney was the founder of a Hempstead gang, but two years ago decided to turn his life around.
“When I was 15 years old, I started a gang called the Outlaws, which was part of the bloods,” Coney told WRHU 88.7 FM in an interview with the station’s community affairs program a couple weeks before his death. The interview had yet to air on the radio when Coney was gunned down.
“We didn’t think that it was going to grow as big as it did,” Coney said of the gang he had founded. The Outlaws started with weekly meetings every Friday, where girls would be initiated by having sex and boys would be beaten for a certain amount of time. The gang’s violence progressed to the point where members began using guns, according to Coney.
“I actually shot somebody myself, and the guy shot me when I was 17 years old,” said Coney.
Two weeks later he was sent to jail for gun possession and for drug dealing and possession. He spent five years in prison. After he was released, he learned that a friend had been murdered. Coney intended to avenge his friend’s death, but was talked out of it by Bishop J. Raymond Mackey from his parish, Tabernacle of Joy Church on Brookside Avenue in Uniondale.
Bishop Mackey, who Coney described as a father figure, eventually helped Coney get into Nassau Community College and find a job with the Help End Violence Now Coalition, or HEVN, as an assistant outreach worker.
The bishop insisted that Coney was in the bar that night as part of his outreach. “He had been out on the streets late at night, Friday and Saturday, recruiting,” said Mackey. “Trust me. He wasn’t in there for a negative purpose, in that bar.”
“He went where they were, to reach ’em,” said Mackey, referring to young people who may have been on the path to violence that Coney had taken.
One of HEVN’s focuses is to bring resources to families, said Mackey. The strategy is that a nurturing home environment will keep young people from deciding to join gangs.
“The gang members didn’t come out of the streets, they didn’t come out of the communities, they didn’t come out of the schools. They came out of homes,” said Mackey.
“Hykiem is proof that HEVN’s strategy works,” he added.
“My life has changed totally, but I can’t say I’m a perfect person,” said Coney of his reform. “A lot of my friends are dead. A lot of my friends are in jail. And a lot of ’em, God forbid, are on their way if they don’t change.”
Of the 58 members of the Outlaws, Coney said only he and two others decided to abandon the gangster lifestyle. In the two years since he left the gang, he has been encouraging young people take a different path than he did.
“It’s just a blessing to be part of heaven and being used as a vessel from God to help these kids…and let them know it’s a better way,” Coney told WRHU.
Though Coney was declared brain dead, Mackey had been praying for his “full recovery” and remained optimistic, citing stories he has heard of coma victims who surprised doctors by waking up after showing no signs of brain activity.
“I haven’t entertained any other thought,” said Mackey three days after the shooting. “I believe whole-heartedly that he is going to be restored, and I’m not accepting anything else.”