A Bronx MTA bus rider shot to death by a teen he confronted for talking loudly on a cell phone was a devoted single father on his way to pick up his daughter from daycare, friends and relatives said Tuesday.
Jonathan Tyquan “Ty” Pettigrew, 41, had in recent months gotten himself and his little girl out of a shelter and was working in a job where he was happy, his family said.
“We grew up with principles and, you know, we can’t be around a lot of noise and screaming and all that,” said Avery Pettigrew, 43, the victim’s brother.
“My brother, he was always a person who if somebody’s being disrespectful to other people, he’ll try to talk to the person. It went the wrong way. But that shouldn’t have happened on a city bus like that to my little brother. That is out of line.”
Cops said Jonathan was on a Bx36 bus on E. Tremont Ave. near White Plains Road when he confronted a teenage passenger talking loudly on his cell phone about 2:30 p.m. Monday.
After an exchange of words, officials said, the teen pulled out a gun and shot Jonathan twice in the stomach.
Medics rushed the victim to Jacobi Medical Center, where he died.
The shooter fled from the bus, cops said. He was last seen running south on White Plains Road wearing a white T-shirt and carrying a black handgun, according to law enforcement sources.
There have been no arrests.
“I hope they arrest him. I hope they really do. Because if they don’t get this guy, then I want to tell him if I find him what I’ll do,” the brother said. “I’m not a bad guy but I will try to kill him. I never killed nobody before but I would try to kill him.”
“My life is changed because my little brother is gone,” he added. “I think he was going to get his daughter from the daycare. He worked every day. He had custody of his daughter. He just got his apartment. He used to pick up his daughter.”
The daughter is now with the mother of one of the victim’s other children.
The victim was the father of six other children but had sole custody of the little girl. The catering job helped him get out of the shelter and find an apartment in the Soundview section of the Bronx.
“He was cleaning, throwing out the garbage,” Avery said of his brother’s job. “He’d do a couple of things. Doing dishes, all that stuff, cleaning.”
When cops called Avery to inform him of his brother’s death, he was in disbelief.
“I called my little brother, my baby brother, and he’s telling me it’s true and I hear somebody crying in the background — and I’m listening to my moms crying,” Avery said, adding this his mother recently had a stroke. “I don’t know what to do. I got bad anxiety. I couldn’t stop crying but I had to calm myself down.”
Jonathan’s death hit the whole neighborhood hard.
“He was definitely a good father,” said Kevin, 64, a neighborhood friend of the victim. “He always had her. He talked about her all the time. That was his pride and joy, to make sure she was good. I just asked him yesterday, ‘How’s baby girl?’ and he said, ‘She good.’”
Kevin said he ran into Pettigrew the morning of the day he was killed at the bus stop, where Pettigrew was waiting for a ride to his job.
“We was just talking yesterday,” the friend said. “He was good. He was talking about the game, basketball, the Knicks game.”
With Rocco Parascandola and Roni Jacobson
