Roxbury shooting victim had bright future, aunt says

The aunt of a young woman slain in a Roxbury double shooting on Saturday remembered her niece as a hard-working, ambitious person whose bright future was cut short.

Police identified the woman Sunday night as Brianna Bigby, 23, of Boston.

“It’s been hard . . . to have a precious angel like her taken away too soon, way too soon,” said her aunt, Darlene Atkins, in a phone interview Sunday afternoon.

Atkins said the male victim in the shooting was Bigby’s boyfriend. A police spokeswoman declined to identify the man.

The two were shot around 3:22 p.m. Saturday while inside a silver sedan on Walnut Avenue in Roxbury, Police Superintendent William B. Evans said at the scene.

Evans said the wounded man then drove to a Mobil gas station in nearby Egleston Square. He was transported to Boston Medical Center and was in serious condition, Evans said.

Evans said police were searching for a dark-colored sport utility vehicle seen on Walnut Avenue.

Atkins said her sister, Bigby’s mother, was distraught and unable to talk with a reporter, but she described her niece as “a good kid” who “did everything right, nothing wrong.”

She said the family believed Bigby’s boyfriend was the target of Saturday’s shooting.

“He’d been in trouble in the past. . . . It could only be for him,” she said of the shooting.

Atkins said someone also fired shots into Bigby’s car last year, an incident she said she believed was also connected to her niece’s boyfriend. She said the boyfriend, whom she knew only by his first name, didn’t come around Bigby’s family often. “I really don’t know him that well,” Atkins said. “I wish I did.”

Atkins said Bigby had only one sibling, a sister who lives in the Boston area.

She said Bigby had attended college in Baltimore, but had not completed her studies. At the time of her death, Atkins said, Bigby worked at a bank and had a second job at a shelter. “She was the perfect daughter. She had her moments, as all kids do growing up, but that had nothing to do with [the shooting],” Atkins said. “She had it going on. She had everything going on for her.”

Officer Neva Coakley, a Boston police spokeswoman, said the investigation was “very active” and included examining a possible connection to a shooting roughly a half-mile away at 249 Humboldt Ave. at about 5:43 a.m. Saturday.

The two men wounded in that shooting were treated at Boston Medical Center, with one in critical but stable condition.

Coakley said Sunday that the only known connection between the shootings was that witnesses saw a black SUV at both scenes.

Another weekend shooting occurred shortly after 5 p.m. Sunday, when a male victim was shot in the leg in the area of 333 Martin Luther King Blvd. in Roxbury, according to Officer James Kenneally, a Boston police spokesman.

Kenneally said that victim’s wounds were not life-threatening.