Nurlan John spent a quarter-century in a wheelchair after being shot in the neck on Eastern Parkway near Schenectady Avenue in Crown Heights back in 2000. He died in his Marine Park apartment nearly a year ago, and only now has the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner determined that the decades-old gunshot wound killed him — turning a cold assault case into an active homicide investigation.
John was 23 when he was shot on Sept. 29, 2000, according to The Blotter. He was 48 years old when a home health attendant found him dead in his apartment on Sept. 23, 2025, as reported by the New York Daily News. On Aug. 4, the city medical examiner officially ruled that John's death was caused by cardiovascular disease resulting from the thoracic spinal cord injury he suffered in the shooting — a determination that came nearly 11 months after he died, and which converted his case from an old assault into a homicide.
John's family only learned afterward that his death had been classified as a homicide, per the Daily News. His sister, 51-year-old Adonis John, described him as a man who worked as a deejay, sent mix tapes to family and friends, and used Access-A-Ride to travel to venues for his gigs despite living in a wheelchair for 25 years. Born in Grenada, John moved to Brooklyn with his family at age four, graduated from William E. Grady High School, where he developed a talent for carpentry, and was known for cooking for friends and family and helping his neighbors, the paper reports.
A Cold Case Reopens Decades Later
In the months following the 2000 shooting, two people were arrested, according to The Blotter — a male teenager charged with assault and a 17-year-old female charged with weapon possession. Authorities never established a motive, and no murder or attempted murder indictments were ever secured against anyone for the attack. The bullet remained inside John's body for the rest of his life.
Now that the medical examiner has tied his death directly to that old gunshot wound, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez's office says it is reviewing the case, according to a spokesman cited by the Daily News. John's four surviving siblings plan to gather at their mother's Brooklyn home next month, per the same report.
Why a 25-Year-Old Shooting Can Still Become a Murder Case
New York law makes this kind of delayed prosecution possible. The state became the first in the nation to abolish the common-law year-and-a-day rule back in 1934, according to research published by the University of New Mexico Digital Repository. That old rule once barred murder charges if a victim survived more than a year and a day after being attacked. And under New York Criminal Procedure Law § 40.20(2)(d), prosecutors are statutorily permitted to try someone for homicide even if they were previously prosecuted for the underlying assault — a delayed-death exception to double jeopardy the state's highest court affirmed in People v. Latham, a 1994 ruling available through Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute.
Delayed homicide rulings like John's aren't unprecedented in New York City. A 2009 study of city medical examiner cases found that delayed homicides accounted for dozens of annual murder rulings, with paraplegic gunshot victims surviving a mean interval of 20.3 years before dying of secondary systemic complications, according to research indexed on PubMed. That timeline tracks closely with what happened to John, who lived 25 years after his injury.
A Pattern Seen in Gun Violence Nationwide
John's case also fits into broader patterns around firearm-related spinal cord injuries. Acts of violence, primarily gunshot wounds, are a leading cause of traumatic spinal cord injuries in the United States, according to 2024 national statistics from the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center published by the Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center, with roughly a quarter of recent cases occurring among Black individuals. Globally, more than 15 million people live with traumatic spinal cord injuries, and those injuries carry a significantly elevated risk of premature death years or even decades after the initial trauma due to secondary cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, according to World Health Organization data published in April 2024.
The year John was shot, 2000, the NYPD recorded 673 homicides citywide, per The Blotter — a far higher toll than the department logs in recent years, underscoring just how much the city's violent crime landscape has shifted since John was first paralyzed.
Prosecutorial Hurdles After 25 Years
Legal analysts note that pursuing murder indictments in decades-old delayed homicides presents serious obstacles for prosecutors, including missing physical evidence, unlocatable witnesses, and memories degraded by the passage of a quarter-century, The Blotter reports. Whether the Brooklyn DA's office still has the original ballistics and case files from the 2000 shooting, and whether either of the two people arrested back then was ever convicted, remain open questions as the review moves forward.
For now, John's family is left waiting to see whether a case that went unresolved for 25 years will finally produce answers about who was responsible for the shooting that upended his life — and, prosecutors now believe, eventually ended it.
