A Brooklyn Park man exchanged gunfire with another man across a residential street near the city’s water tower after a water gun fight among children grew into a brawl among adults, according to a criminal complaint.
Joseph Michael Brooks, 38, is charged in Hennepin County District Court with aiding and abetting second-degree riot while armed with a dangerous weapon, a felony. The complaint was filed Oct. 23 with a warrant for his arrest. Bail was set at $100,000. The complaint says he is believed to have left Minnesota.
According to the complaint, officers responded at about 8 p.m. Sept. 12 to a report of shots fired by the water tower. They found more than 20 people in the street and in front yards, yelling and pointing at each other and each claiming the other side had fired. The shots were reported between two homes that face each other across the street.
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A boy told officers he had been outside playing with water guns with other children when a girl from across the street came over with a water gun full of boiling water. He said that started a fight among the children. He said the girl went home to get her parents. Soon “all the uncles and dads” came outside and they were all fighting, he told officers.
The boy pointed out a man pacing in a driveway as the shooter he saw fire into the air. That man, David Jerome Bryant, 45, of Brooklyn Center, was charged Sept. 15 in a separate complaint with illegally possessing a firearm after a conviction for a crime of violence and with reckless discharge of a firearm within a city. Both counts are felonies.
Surveillance video shows Brooks confronting a young man in the street at about 7:38 p.m., according to the complaint. At about 7:58 p.m. he is seen with his sweatshirt off at the open front door of a Chevrolet Trailblazer registered to him. He is then seen in a close, face-to-face conversation with Bryant. The video then shows Bryant firing toward Brooks while Brooks has his arm raised as if shooting, the complaint says. Both men were in the front yards of the homes across from each other. Many people, including children, were outside at the time.
Officers found several casings, including a .45-caliber Blazer casing in a front yard. A search warrant turned up a safe belonging to Brooks that held a partial box of Blazer .45-caliber ammunition with six rounds left, according to the complaint. A cellphone belonging to Brooks was found in the Trailblazer.
