A summit on violence prevention in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood opened on a grim note after man was shot and killed outside. New York State Senator Jesse Hamilton was concluding a meeting on gang violence and about to head to a summit on reducing youth violence when he heard the gunfire, DNAinfo reports. In a dramatic video, Hamilton narrates the scene of the shooting.

“A young man was shot right outside the building where we were having this meeting,” a distressed Hamilton says in the video. “This is unreal. I’ve never seen a young man shot, actually shot and died before my eyes.”

Off-camera a woman is crying. “This don’t make no sense,” she says between sobs. Hamilton said the incident is a textbook case of the violence the community is working to prevent.

“The people we brought together today aim to prevent shootings like the one we witnessed outside the windows of our meeting room,” he said in a statement. “We are committed to stopping the violence, to ending intergenerational poverty in Brownsville, to helping neighborhood residents get the opportunities they deserve. We can’t continue to lose young people to senseless violence.”

—Kelly Weill