A Brooklyn man brutally gunned down on New Year’s Day as he got home from a midnight church service was an innocent bystander who was mistakenly shot, police said yesterday.
Tralane Walker, 25, the city’s first murder victim of 2004, was shot outside his home in Canarsie after returning from a New Year’s Eve Mass with his family, cops said.
Walker, a nurse’s aide and security guard, had returned from church with his mother and other relatives around 1 a.m and was outside with friends when two shots rang out. The friends ran off, not realizing Walker had been shot once in the head.
Walker’s friends returned 20 minutes later and told detectives at the scene that the gunman was Nehru Gumbs, 18, who had been looking for a man who was a romantic rival, family members said.
Cops arrested Gumbs on Thursday and charged him yesterday with murder.