“And then I heard this woman behind me screaming and crying,” recalled Peterson, the president of the Fort Greene PUPS. “I don’t know how, but I knew he had stolen something from the woman.”

And then Peterson got mad.

“I thought, ‘How dare you do that to somebody in this neighborhood!'”

And so Peterson and Tim raced off after the apparent mugger, with Peterson screaming, “My dog will rip you apart!”

. . .

The driver’s side seats of the Audi Q7 are draped with black and yellow plastic, the rear window is shattered, and it appears that some dried blood is on the back seat. The four bullet holes on the driver’s side back door are marked with police evidence labels.

“Something like this doesn’t make residents feel safe,” Nate Shaw, 38, who had previously noticed the vehicle while walking with his 4-year-old daughter, said. “My two sons would probably think it’s cool, but I think having to explain it got shot up would be worrisome,” a 40-year-old carpenter from Carroll Gardens, Greg Paul, said. “Why doesn’t the police department have more space to store shot vehicles?”

. . .

“An officer drove it into the spot and it has been there for at least two weeks,” the manager of Francesco Pizzeria, which has large windows facing onto the street where the car is parked, Anthony Caravello, said.

The vehicle was confiscated in connection with a homicide investigation, police said.

On October 6, an unknown number of suspects riding in the Audi shot at Andre Garcia in front of 66 Sullivan St. in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, which shares a police precinct with Carroll Gardens.

“Yeah, he deserves it,” David Avery, 50, said as he stood near what was once center field in Ebbets Field and is now the front courtyard of the Ebbets Field Apartments in Crown Heights. “It’s overdue.”

Yesterday’s vote, by the Hall of Fame’s veterans’ committee, was a bit of a twist of the knife, to be sure. Mr. O’Malley’s great accomplishment, after all, was to take Major League Baseball to the West Coast, allowing it to become a truly national sport. This left a few ruffled feathers back in Brooklyn.

But revisionist history has been relatively kind to Mr. O’Malley, who owned the Dodgers from 1950 to 1970. Many historians maintain that Robert Moses, still at the height of his city-shaping powers in the late 1950s, forced Mr. O’Malley’s hand by refusing to use eminent domain law to acquire land for Mr. O’Malley to build a new domed stadium along Atlantic Avenue to replace the undersize Ebbets Field.

Others say Mr. O’Malley forced Mr. Moses to force his hand by making unreasonable demands for land and snubbing Mr. Moses’s offer of a stadium in Queens. They say he was just looking for an excuse to move to Los Angeles, where he knew he could make a lot more money.

. . .

Sure, the Dodgers’ departure may have hastened white flight and other harbingers of the borough’s economic decline in the 1960s and ’70s. Mark Naison, a Fordham University professor of African-American studies and a Brooklyn native, called the team “one of the few threads that connected the growing black population of Brooklyn with the declining ethnic white population of Brooklyn.”

But those days are gone, too. Brooklyn is hardly down on its heels anymore. It has survived, and thrived, quite well without Mr. O’Malley’s Dodgers.

Just across Atlantic Avenue from where Mr. O’Malley wanted to build his stadium, the developer Bruce Ratner is developing a $4 billion complex, the Atlantic Yards, featuring a basketball arena. It might not be too popular in some parts of Brooklyn, but anyone who rooted for Mr. O’Malley to get his way would be hard pressed to spit in the face of Mr. Ratner’s plan.

The decline of anti-O’Malleyism in Brooklyn can be traced even more directly to simple demographics: There are just not that many people around to hate him anymore. According to census statistics, more than 85 percent of today’s 2.5 million Brooklynites were either not yet born or living outside the United States when the Dodgers packed up after the 1957 season.

Christina Copeman, 70, was found lying on her side in the second-floor hallway of the three-story building she owned on East 92nd Street in East Flatbush.

Her nephew, Peter Bishop, said she was wearing a heavy coat, a hat and a scarf.

Altea Bishop said she believed her sister had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

“She kept to herself, like a hermit,” she said. “She didn’t bother her neighbors. She wouldn’t answer the door.”

An employee at the city Medical Examiner’s Office said the body had decayed to the point where Copeman was mostly bone.

“She was past decomposing; she was totally gone,” the city worker said. “She’d been dead a long time. It wasn’t gruesome; it was just sad.”

Neighbors said they last saw Copeman alive in December 2005 — and they claimed that they called 311 and 911 numerous times, but that nothing happened.

Peter Bishop, 35, a Staten Island limo driver, said he finally filed a missing-person report after failing to get results from calling the cops, calling his aunt, and knocking on Copeman’s door.

“We called the police all the time,” he said. “They would come, but they wouldn’t do anything.”

Yesterday, the police — this time, armed with the missing-person report — forced open the door to Copeman’s home and came across her body.

For more than a year, residents of one Brooklyn neighborhood have been complaining about a stomach-churning smell wafting from the site of a former sewer pipe project.

The city’s response? Tossing nylon socks filled with pine deodorizer into the catch basins.

That hasn’t stanched the stench. In fact, locals say the scent of raw sewage is even more noticeable now.

“I think that adding the pine made the existing smell even more potent,” said Aaron Green, 27, one of the Bay Ridge residents who is sick of the stink.

The stink has been hovering over a stretch of Fort Hamilton Parkway between Marine Ave. and 99th St.

The odor cropped up in the summer of 2006 after the completion of a $6.9 million project to combine the underground sewer pipes there, residents say.