Fourteen Years Cold: New Information About the 2006 Unsolved Murder of Tiesha Sargeant in Brooklyn
Tiesha Sargeant’s family and friends have been waiting nearly 14 years for justice, and the answer to one painful, lingering question: Who shot and killed the much-loved 26-year-old on May 14, 2006, in the second-floor Brooklyn apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Keve Huggins?
Tiesha died from a single gunshot wound to the back of the head in the early morning hours of Mother’s Day, during what Huggins has described as a home invasion led by three masked intruders. It was also Huggins’s 28th birthday. Huggins later admitted to being a weed-dealer, confessing that he’d sold $6,000 worth of pot out of their house that day, which he indicated as a potential motive in the case.
No new evidence or leads have been made public in Tiesha’s case since 2006, and Robert Kolker’s story in New York Magazine, “Nine Blocks From Home,” published a few months after the killing, has been the most comprehensive overview of Tiesha’s life and slaying to date. The consensus seemed to be that Tiesha was killed by someone who knew there would be money and drugs in the house, likely in a burglary-gone-wrong.
I have contacted hundreds of sources and filed dozens of FOIA letters to get more information about Tiesha’s case, with the hope of getting more concrete answers about what happened. I was told that the NYPD’s cold case squad reopened the case in 2017. However, the NYPD cold case unit is tragically underserved, and despite icy relations between the media and the police, we can do better work in tandem. It’s important to remember that Tiesha was killed at a time and place when trust for the police in the community was very low, and not much has changed.
My interviews with people close to the crime led to the discovery of these new facts about— and dimensions to— the case:
Multiple neighbors I spoke to corroborate that intruders came through the front door of the building at 1785 Bedford Ave, not up the back fire escape as previously reported, and that they were most likely led upstairs by Tiesha. This means Keve and Tiesha may have known the killers personally.
After having shot Tiesha, neighbors believe the intruders escaped by way of the roof. This suggests the intruders may have known the building. A .38 caliber gun was reported discarded in the backyard of 1785 Bedford Ave, but it’s possible it was not the gun used in the shooting. Based on the structure of the building, that gun could have been thrown from any number of nearby dwellings, including Tiesha and Keve’s apartment.
A woman who lived on the third floor, directly above Tiesha and Keve, named Mrs. Brown was one of the first to call police around 1:30 AM. She reported hearing a “firecracker and screams.” Mrs. Brown is now deceased.
When Tiesha and Keve moved in to the Bedford Ave apartment together, Keve’s name was not put on the lease due to a pending drug charge in the Miami-Dade area. He was indeed arrested for cannabis possession on 10/10/2005 in Miami, according to records I requested through a FOIA letter.
Some neighbors said it’s known that Keve was selling large quantities of marijuana out of the apartment, and that he would routinely come downstairs in the middle of the night, as with the night Tiesha was killed, to exchange cash for marijuana deliveries on the street.
Neighbors also corroborate that smaller quantities— dime-bags and nickel-bags— of weed were being sold on a nearby street, potentially by members of a Jamaican gang. The area is known for gang activity, more recently between feuding Bergen Family and Lincoln Family gangs, and other offshoots of the Crips and Bloods.
Keve comes from a politically connected family in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. His father is Joseph Burns Bonadie, a well-known and sometimes divisive trade unionist. His family has political connections stretching all the way to Canada.
Also living in the building at 1785 Bedford Ave at the time of the shooting was Peter “DJ Peter Panic” Pottinger, a friend of Keve’s, the son of the building’s co-owner and a music producer, who recorded music in the building, and had some prior run-ins with the law.
I have some additional information that I’m not yet ready to make public, as I continue to try to recreate and make sense of the circumstances surrounding Tiesha’s death. If you have any information you feel may be helpful to my investigation, please email me.
Police sketch of intruder based on Keve Huggins’s description of the gunman