A man shot to death on the street in Brooklyn had learned to walk again as a boy after his foot was nearly severed in a gruesome trash compactor accident — and more recently was trying to turn his back on a life of crime.
Thomas Little’s life story was once one of triumphant persistence only to be replaced by the too-common tale of a spiral into imprisonment and deadly gun violence.
“I understand that time is limited and at any given moment, anyone can run out of time,” Little told a federal judge just last year as he sought to make a fresh start.
Little, 34, first made headlines more than 20 years ago. After sliding down a Brooklyn building’s garbage chute at age 9 to retrieve a superintendent’s keys, his foot caught in the trash compactor and was left hanging by only a tendon.
“He did have a really hard life,” Little’s longtime girlfriend, who only gave her name as Raquel, said last week after his slaying. “He’s had to be strong since a very young age.”
After nearly a dozen operations, four years of physical therapy and the constant prayers of his mother, Little was able to walk again.
“I didn’t want to be like an old man,” he told the Daily News at the time.
But not even the $2.3 million settlement his family got from the Red Hook building’s owner was enough to spare him from circumstances that later led to a lengthy prison sentence — or a final confrontation that cost him his life.
About 12:30 a.m. June 6, Little was shot multiple times in the head outside an apartment building on Somers St. near Fulton St. in Bedford-Stuyvesant, cops said. He died at Brookdale University Hospital.
Police have made no arrests.
Federal court documents reveal a troubled life, including an eight-year prison sentence for a robbery on Long Island.
The last time he saw a judge, in February 2025, he said he hoped to put that life behind him.
Little was arrested in Arizona for helping smuggle four Mexican citizens hidden in a car across the border into the U.S. After serving a 21-month prison sentence, he violated the terms of his supervised release in July 2024 in Idaho, when he was caught riding in a car with guns inside.
That arrest landed him in the notorious Brooklyn MDC federal jail for more than eight months where he didn’t have access to the oxycodone that helped him manage the constant pain in his foot and had no physical therapy.
“I’m sorry for my wrongdoings,” he told Manhattan Federal Court Judge Analisa Torres, who sentenced him to time served for the supervised release violation.
“I’m sorry for leaving the district and being in that car without permission. I look forward to doing better. And I understand that time is limited and at any given moment, anyone can run out of time. And I need to use my time better.”
While at the MDC, he told his mother the agony was so great that he was thinking about requesting he finally have his foot amputated, his lawyer told the judge.
In a letter to the judge before his release, Little wrote about the pain, about his brother’s death in January 2025, and about how he planned to devote his time to his then-14-year-old daughter.
Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News
Thomas Little was fatally shot outside an apartment building on Somers St. near Fulton St. in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn on June 6. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News)
He had gotten work driving commercial trucks and was hoping to find out if he could keep doing that or if the deteriorating condition of his foot would make that impossible. And he wanted to train to become a mechanic, he wrote.
“Despite all the hardships I’m facing here, I have been trying to stay positive and productive. When I first got here I was feeling pessimistic, and I still do at times but knowing that I can eventually get out has made me think more positive,” he wrote. “I know that this doesn’t have to be the end result of my life, or the place I’ll end up coming back to.”
Among those sharing Raquel’s grief is another woman with whom Little was in a relationship. Nariyah, who is 2 months pregnant with his child, had been with Little at a rooftop New York Knicks watch party the night he was killed nearby.
“He was like, ‘Yeah, Knicks, yeah, Knicks!’” she said. “He’s joking, he’s like, ‘Yeah, I bet my entire rent money on this.’”
Nariyah was mad with Little because after going to the party together, he kept leaving her there to fend for herself.
“He kept going in and out, like telling me I couldn’t come with him,” said Nariya, who called Little after he left the party. “We had an argument about him leaving me at the rooftop with people I don’t know. Probably like four minutes after I got off the phone with him, he was shot. I was the last person he talked to.”
The gunman fled in a black sedan, an NYPD source said.
“What they did to him was absolutely horrendous,” Little’s mother, Josephine DeJesus, said. “And they were cowards.”
DeJesus said her son was the type of person who put everyone else above himself.
“He was a giver. He was a nurturer,” she said. “If he loved you, he loved you hard and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for you.”
DeJesus was the one who talked doctors out of amputating Little’s foot when he was a boy and it was just hanging on by a tendon. Even now, she said, her faith remains strong.
“As sure as God is God, the answer will be revealed,” she said. “And there will be justice.”
