Dad Pulls Assault Rifle on Teen Vandals

Frustrated father charged with assault after wounding three, according to report.

A Brooklyn father frustrated by a group of teenage vandals prowling his Marine Park neighborhood faces assault charges after pulling a rifle on them, police said.

Two of the teens and a resident were wounded when Thomas Dunikowski, 30, snapped and opened fire on the gang that had been lurking on his block, knocking over trash cans, damaging cars and loitering on neighbors’ stoops late Saturday, reports The New York Post.

Dunikowski first tried to persuade the teens to leave the Stuart Street block in a nonviolent manner, but when they refused, he rushed back into the home he shares with his wife and 2-year-old son, picked up his Bushmaster 5.56, a military-grade assault rifle, and began shooting from a second-floor window, police told the Post.

“There were kids on bikes all over the place – then I heard pop! Pop! Pop!” a neighbor told the paper. “I looked out my window, and [a] kid was laying there on the street.”

After the shooting, Dunikowski tried to conceal the unlicensed weapon on the roof of his building and got into bed as if he had nothing to do with the melee, police sources told the Post.

When cops arrived at his home, Dunikowski’s wife told them at first that her husband was not involved in the crime, but eventually caved when they warned her they could take her baby boy away from her if she hindered the investigation.

None of the alleged teenage hoodlums was identified. One of them was hospitalized in stable condition after being shot in the neck and another was hospitalized for bullet wounds to the arm and leg, reports the Post. The condition of the second teenager shot wasn’t immediately available.

A bullet fragment hit Yana Kaprovskaya, a 21-year-old bystander, in the knee.

Dunikowski was charged with assault with intent to cause serious injury with a weapon, resisting arrest, criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment. It wasn’t immediately clear if he had an attorney. 

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