Deadly shootout outside Fern Rock speakeasy wounds 4, shakes tight-knit neighborhood

THE BLOCK CAPTAIN who sweeps Park Avenue between Olney and Chew in Fern Rock will have to be extra vigilant this week.

The block captain, whose name the Daily News is withholding for her safety, said she'll be looking for any spent shell casings left over from a wild shootout outside an unlicensed club at the corner of Chew and Park just after midnight yesterday. The shootout, police said, left two men dead and two others wounded. No arrests had been made last night.

On the block yesterday afternoon, more than a dozen white chalk rings marked the spots where bullet casings littered the pavement, spanning almost the entire block.

"The whole street looks like it was a shooting gallery," Police Capt. Michael Gormley told reporters early yesterday.

As she looked down at one ring on the street just in front of the house she moved into in 1976, the block captain frowned. "I didn't know it was this close," she said.

She and her 10-year-old grandson had been watching TV in her enclosed sun porch when the gunfire began, shaking the tight-knit block - where at least a few houses have private surveillance cameras - to its core.

"I grabbed him and said, 'Get down,' " the woman recounted.

The windows of her neighbors' minivan were shot out in the chaos. The neighbors, who have lived on the block for 10 years, said they, too, hit the floor inside their rowhouse amid the gunfire.

"It sounded like 50 shots," one man said. Several neighbors said that a few hundred people, many on motorcycles, converged on the block Saturday night to attend what appeared to be a motorcycle-club event inside the speakeasy before drama spilled outside, ending in bullets and bloodshed. The venue has a sign for a day-care center, but neighbors said it has recently operated as a nightclub and event hall on weekends.

When the smoke cleared, police said, a 26-year-old man who was shot in the back and a 39-year-old man who was shot in the chest three times both died at Albert Einstein Medical Center, about two blocks away. Two other victims, a 39-year-old man and a 41-year-old man, were in stable condition recovering from bullet wounds to their limbs yesterday, police said.

Cops yesterday did not release the victims' identities or a motive, but some neighbors said they heard shouting on the block just before the gunfire. A police spokeswoman said investigators found two guns left at the scene.

One neighbor who peeked out his window during the shooting said he saw one man fire several shots at another from point-blank range before a second shooter, dressed in all white, emerged from the other side of the speakeasy building and began firing.

The block captain said she plans to see to it that the speakeasy - now the scene of two shootings in recent months, according to residents - doesn't serve as an illegal nightclub or a backdrop for a shooting again.

"We don't need that," she said. "We keep trying to repair the neighborhood, and something comes in and tears it down."

Blog: PhillyConfidential.com