Remembering Damon S. Allen This Labor Day

Labor Day brings a festive atmosphere to Crown Heights. In preparation for the West Indian American Day Parade, which marches up Eastern Parkway on Labor Day, the sidewalks fill preemptively with smokers. Neighbors share jerk chicken, escovitch fish, corn, and hard dow. In the days before the parade women line the sidewalk in their carnival regalia for last-minute fittings. The air, already thick from the late-summer humidity becomes smoky. The bass from Caribbean pop and hip-hop makes the windows rattle. People yell greetings from their cars while shrewd residents sell parking spaces and bathroom access.

At the corner of St. Marks at Nostrand Avenue is a co-named street for Damon S. Allen, a sanitation worker who received a medal of valor in 2005 and died a year later while attending a birthday party on Labor Day. The co-named street includes the block where Allen lived until his death in 2006.

Allen was less than a month into his new job as a sanitation worker on the overnight shift when he and his partner, Michael Kalinowski, saved a young girl from a burning building. Allen was behind the wheel of a sanitation truck on September 14, 2005, when Kalinowski noticed a three-story building on fire on Remsen Avenue in East Flatbush. Allen spotted a Damon Whyte, and McCovery, his step-daughter, on the third-floor fire escape. McCovery was dropped into Allen’s arms from the first-floor landing of the fire escape. Allen and Kalinowski were awarded Gold Medals of Honor from the city.

They continued working the overnight shift together.

A year later, on September 4, 2006, Allen was shot and killed on Prospect Place, a block from his own home. Police officers, who take over Crown Heights during Labor Day weekend, arrived at the party at 1:15 a.m. “to warn the people there of suspicious activity nearby.” Shortly after their departure “several strangers” attempted to enter the apartment and were turned away, but lingered outside. The host asked attendees to go home, and guests exited at 2 a.m.

As shots were fired, Allen advised guests–his friends and family–to hit the ground. As he did this he was shot in the head. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the Kings County Hospital Center.

Allen was survived by his two children, who were 5 and 13 when their father died, his sister, and their mother. Despite my best efforts, I can not find evidence that anyone was charged with Allen’s murder.

The Damon S. Allen Foundation Against Violence was founded the next year. It hosted the Damon S. Allen Day of Unity in 2007 in Brower Park and end-of-summer events in the years following. In 2013, the Foundation supported the protest to keep the Starlite Lounge open.

Five people, including a 6-year-old, were shot Monday morning at 3 a.m. on Nostrand Avenue near Crown Street during the neighborhood’s J’ouvert celebration. Like Allen’s murder, gang activity is suspected as the cause of the shooting.