WARNING: Graphic Picture featured in this article.
A troubled exotic dancer who recently separated from her wife and lost her kids to foster care, was shot in the head execution style on a Gramercy Park sidewalk, while walking home on Thursday.
Imani Armstrong was going home from a late shift at her second job at an IHOP at about 5 a.m. when a masked gunman snuck up and blasted her in the back of the head at East 14th Street and Irving Place.
“When I heard the shot, I was like, ‘Oh sh*t.’It was like one loud bang . . . I heard one shot and then silence,” said Maximillian Stebelsky, 18, a neuroscience major who lives in a nearby NYU dorm.
“I never predicted something like this to happen, especially across the street from where I live.”
“The motive for the slaying remained unknown, but the shooting of Armstrong was not random,” cops reported.
“The individual was targeted,” Chief of Department Kenneth Corey said Thursday. “We have a number of suspects that we’re looking at, but nothing we want to commit to right now. But I’m very comfortable saying it was not a random attack.”
The shooter and a woman, both wearing black, were seen running north, but the woman may have just been a bystander running from the gunfire.
This horrific incident happened after Armstrong was already going through major struggles in her life. She had just been served divorce papers by her wife and recently moved out of the apartment they shared together, about a month ago.
“Her kids have been in foster care on Staten Island and she was attending anger management classes in hopes of getting them back,” coworkers said. “Before she was killed, there didn’t seem to be any signs that something was on her mind troubling her.”
“She seemed happy. She was greeting the customers and all that stuff,” one IHOP coworker said about Armstrong’s final moments leading up to her murder.
Armstrong had stayed beyond her regular shift because the restaurant was busy, and headed toward 14th Street to take the train as she normally did when she left for the day.
Armstrong, who was originally from Texas, had been trying to better herself, the IHOP employee said. “She was good. She worked well,” the coworker said. “She got along with everybody. She knew a lot of people around here.”
Armstrong, who danced under the name “Red,” was fighting to get her kids back and had recently been robbed by a friend at the club where she dances.
Cops had been called to a Queens apartment in January 2021 where she and her partner got into an argument over their children and her partner choked her and shoved her to the ground.
Armstrong told her coworker the ex had reached out last week via text saying “I love you, I miss you”.
A 56-year-old man who gave his first name, Manny, said he was working at his nearby coffee cart when the shooting happened.
“Before the shooting, I didn’t hear any commotion, nothing,” he said.
When he saw the body, Manny thought, “Oh my God. I wondered if she had kids, what about her family.”
There were other people around, who called 911, so he didn’t.
“It’s a shame,” Manny said. “You have these people killing one another. They kill somebody and the system lets them back out. They are right back on the streets and they do the same s–t again. It’s crazy.”
“The president, the politicians, they are not doing anything about it. All they think about is getting voted back in,” he said. “You got some sick, screwed-up people out here.”
That was an execution. Don’t be surprised to hear she had the goods on someone and was blackmailing them.
The detectives know it involved her ex somehow