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It happened around 12:10 a.m. According to police, a man at Encore Hookah and Bistro was asked to leave the lounge which escalated to an altercation with a security guard. That’s when investigators say the man shot the guard killing him. He fled the scene before police arrived.
The parents of slain 18-year-old Jalil Stewart filed suit in Brooklyn Supreme Court against the mall on Flatbush Ave. after discovering video showing their son getting beaten up in front of the security guard wearing a yellow shirt. Stewart was gunned down by Lashajuan Glasgow, 18, less than a mile away from the mall on Avenue O near E. 48th St. on Feb. 26, 2021, prosecutors say.
“He’s just standing there. They did nothing. They did nothing,” said Stewart’s mother, Charlene Stewart, 46, of the security guard in the video. “I’ve never seen my son have a one-on-one fight. I’ve never seen him in that manner. I was heartbroken. I’m his mother. I can see that he’s being hurt and I do not like that at all.”
The victim’s family told The News that he was accosted by a group of teens — including Glasgow — in the mall as he bought a smoothie with friends. The group demanded Stewart and his pals hand over their money, prompting the donnybrook. Stewart rolled on the the ground, tussling with others boys as a security guard watched, according to the lawsuit and video. Stewart’s parents identified him as the boy wearing a red shirt in the video.
An onlooker laughed at the beatdown and filmed with her phone.
“Yo the security guard. The security guard has me dying,” says a girl in the video.
Stewart and his friends eventually left the mall, according to the suit, and got in a car. Glasgow is accused of pursuing Stewart and shooting him in the car. The victim was around the corner from his home in Flatlands.
A law enforcement source confirmed the video of the fight is part of the Brooklyn DA’s investigation of Stewart’s murder.
Glasgow was arrested for the killing on April 9, 2021, charged as an adult for the murder though he was underage at the time. He has pleaded not guilty.
Stewart died five days after the shooting at Maimonides Medical Center. He was months away from graduating from James Madison High School. He was interested in architecture and was hoping to make music for his career.
“He was shopping [record] deals,” his father, James Stewart, 47, told The News, adding that his son spent much of his time, including the night before his murder, in the studio making music.
“We only found out after the incident how talented he was,” his father said.
The lawsuit, filed by attorney Ezra Glaser, argues that the mall’s failure to “call for backup to the scene, call the police to the scene, or otherwise properly apprehend, disarm, or stem the violent attacks,” led directly to Stewart’s murder.
The court filing names Kings Plaza’s owner, Macerich Management Company, along with Allied Universal Security and Glasgow as defendants along with John and Jane Doe security guards. None have filed responses to the suit.
Macerich and Allied did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Neither did Glasgow’s attorney.
The family bemoaned the sorry state of the mall where the fight broke out, saying they haven’t been back since Stewart’s killing despite the fact that they live nearby.
“There are robberies. There was a shooting there just a couple of weeks back. In the mall, crime is very frequent,” James Stewart said.
The NYPD provided data showing it receives more than 200 complaints associated with the mall each year.
“My son was a great young man with a very bright future ahead of him,” said Charlene Stewart. “His legacy will not be that he went to the mall to get a smoothie and was killed ten minutes later.”
2 Responses
This is a sad trend, not only in NY, but all over the country. As a Security Officer that has been in the field for over 30 years with peace officer certification and several security certifications with a background in Emergency Management, I want to weigh in on this issue. I was a former Security Officer at a large mall in NY and sorry to say, management only used us as window dressing as if we were working in Beverly Hills, not a mall 30 minutes from NYC. We were not allowed to use handcuffs, self defense tools (pepper spray or taser), or allowed to physically touch people. All we could do if someone committed an infraction at the mall was to ask them to come to our office so we could give them a banning form advising them that if they came back to the mall before 6 months, they would be arrested by our local police department for trespassing. The offenders would laugh at us, spit on us, or all out assault us and we had no recourse other than a regular citizen has, which was basically charging them with harassment, a violation in NYS. The NY Security Guard Act is a useless law for registering security guards, where the state uses it as a money grab from the guard registration fees and the fees to run a school to teach the classes. The initial class is only 8 hours where you are basically told you are not a cop and don’t act like one, and the 16 hours is an on the job training when you get to your site. It in no way provides enough education to cover the duties and responsibilities of doing security work correctly, and it does not properly screen out candidates that are totally incompetent and should not be working in the field. Here in NY, it is a 6 month class and over 300 hours to work as an Emergency Medical Technician, which pays about the same as Security, and it takes about 8 months to be a volunteer firefighter. So you see where the problem lies. Security needs to be elevated as I stated in a previous post, to the status of a Peace Officer while they are on duty. This can be accomplished, as in 1996, I graduated from a NYS Peace Officer with Firearms Certification to volunteer as a Reserve Deputy Sheriff in my county. It only gave me Peace Officer status when the Sheriff called us for duty, otherwise we were regular civilians. NYS could get rid of the 8 and 16 hour class and replace it with the Peace Officer certification and it would accomplish two things. One would be the security guard would be elevated to an Officer status while on duty with the ability to carry a firearm, and second would be instructors could disqualify students that show incompetence and irresponsibility so that graduates of the Peace Officer class would be guaranteed to be able to do the job. Other states could enact the same standards by using the old Civil Defense Police Officer Program started after WW2 which would give Peace Officer status to officers while on duty and revert back to civilian status when their shift is over. There also needs to be a provision in the program where upon passing the academy, the graduate has 50 state full carry, unrestricted gun permits. The days of the night watchman are over. Society is becoming more violent and entitled, and if these people don’t respect actual Police Officers, what chance does a minimum wage barely educated Security Guard have? Society has a right to feel protected and those that step up and chose to do so must be properly educated and adequately compensated, not just stand around in a uniform and look the part. Owners of Security companies need to step up also. They must provide the education and compensation due to people who work in this profession, screen out incompetent candidates from the start, and support the Officers that work for them. This problem may not be solved overnight, but if no action is taken at all, the problem will never be solved.
Thanks for the reply Gil! I’d love to have you write an article for the magazine. Would you be interested?