Shameek Harrison was old school to the end, refusing to snitch after he was stabbed in Brooklyn, only to be knifed to death six months later by the very same attacker, according to authorities.
Harrison’s 24-year-old cousin said it would have made perfect sense for him to have helped put his nemesis behind bars.
“That’s logical,” she said. “But we live in the ‘hood. So I’m sure you know about snitching.
“Where we live at, cops aren’t really nice to us here, so we’re not really nice to them.”
Police have been dealing for years with the no-snitch edict that rules in many city neighborhoods. Victims routinely tell cops to get lost, or worse, because they hate the authorities, prefer payback over prosecution or both.
Harrison paid the ultimate price when he was killed March 11 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was 44 and had a 28-year-old son by the same name, his family said.
Surveillance video captured the fatal confrontation, which started with an argument between the victim and two other men in the vestibule of a Sumner Houses building on Vernon Ave., where gang violence is common, police said.
The argument spilled outside, with Harrison swinging an aluminum broomstick at his opponents. One of them lunged at him, plunging a knife into his chest, side and leg, while the other punched him over and over again.
Medics rushed Harrison to Woodhull Hospital, but he could not be saved.
At the time, little about the case or the victim was clear. One family member filled in some of the blanks as she left Harrison’s home two blocks from the crime scene, calling him well-liked, watchful of children outside playing and respectful to neighborhood elders.
Friends and neighbor lit candles in memorial and lamented the rise in violence since the pandemic hit the city last year.
Harrison’s accused killer, Darnell Brown, 39 and a member of the Bloods, was busted April 26 on murder and gun charges, asked for a lawyer and said nothing else, police said. The other attacker is still being sought.
But the murder might have been avoided if Harrison made a different decision a few months earlier, police sources said.
On Sept. 9, Harrison was seen on surveillance video grabbing a starter’s pistol from his car and sparking a confrontation with Brown at another Vernon Ave. building only about 200 feet away from where he would later be murdered.
Brown fought back and stabbed Harrison in the side, police said.
Harrison refused medical treatment at the scene, made his way to Woodhull Hospital and survived.
But the quality of the video was poor, so while Brown was arrested, the case could not proceed unless Harrison fingered him as the attacker.
He refused, and Brown was set free. The gun possession charge against Harrison was also dismissed.
Police believe the murder was linked to drugs.
Brown, who is being held without bail, already served three stints in prison, one for assault and two for drugs. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.
Harrison was due in court this week on three marijuana charges. He also did time, serving more than 11 years on a drug conviction and getting paroled in 2012, according to records, and had other arrests for gun possession and assault.
Harrison’s cousin herself is no stranger to violence — her dad Lewayne Harrison was murdered in 2003, when she was seven, right where Harrison was first stabbed. The feds say the murder was committed by two men in a drug turf war at the Sumner and Vernon Houses.
That changed her life, and afterward her cousin “looked out for me and my sister,” she said.
“He looked out for a lot of people around here,” she said. “So I would definitely say that he did his dirt — but he was definitely a good guy. He was a person that I knew I could call on, and I know that many other people would probably feel the same way.”
She added that she wished the unrelenting cycle of violence would stop.
“You would just think that them watching everything that specifically me and my sister already went through, that things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did,” she said. “But it did.”
