ALBANY — The Facebook message Karen Lindsey found in her inbox Sunday morning was chilling, but not entirely unexpected.

"Happy Mother's Day everyone," read the note, sent by one mom to a couple dozen others in her neighborhood. "Who wants to help scrub the blood off the sidewalk in front of the school?"

Lindsey heard the gunshots late Saturday night. There were five, maybe six of them, she said. They woke her out of her sleep.

One of the bullets ripped through the left thigh of Andre Gipson. Life spilled out of the 22-year-old city man's leg as he ran up Elm Street. He eventually collapsed on Philip Street, a block from where the shots were fired.

The shooting occurred at 11:40 p.m. Police said Gipson died at Albany Medical Center Hospital early Sunday morning. It was Albany's first homicide of the year.

"There weren't just little trails or even puddles of blood," said Lindsey, a registered nurse at Albany Med. "There were pools of it. I saw it and knew no one could survive that."

Lindsey's daughter, Elly, is a fifth-grader at The Free School, a small independent alternative school on Elm Street. Gipson was shot about 100 feet away from the school, on the corner of Grand and Elm streets. He sprinted past the school's front steps seconds before he collapsed.

Lindsey and a number of other neighborhood moms began their holiday dipping wiry deck brooms into buckets of bleach.

Under a hot spring sun, they ran the brooms against the coarse concrete stained with Gipson's dried blood, over and over again. Lindsey said everything was covered with flies.

"We wanted to make sure the blood was all gone by the time the kids went to school Monday morning," Lindsey, 45, said. She lives directly behind the school, on Wilbur Street.

Police have yet to reveal a motive for the shooting. There are no suspects. An autopsy will be performed Monday at Albany Med.

Gipson's family could not be reached for comment. Police said he hadn't lived at his listed address on Clinton Avenue in more than two years.

No one in the neighborhood asked by a reporter about the shooting said they knew Gipson. As of late Sunday afternoon, there was no makeshift curbside memorial near the scene, and the lack of one is unusual following a murder in the city.

The shooting took place two blocks and less than 1,000 feet from the governor's mansion.

A fire engine came around noon to hose off the remaining blood trail that zigzagged a full block up Elm Street. No one dared tell any of the neighborhood children excited to see the firetruck the cold truth as to why it was there.

Saturday night was not the first time Lindsey has heard gunshots. Though she admits the sound of gunfire forces her to ponder moving, Lindsey says she won't be quick to pack up and leave her troubled neighborhood.

"I've thought about it, yes, because of my daughter," Lindsey said. "But to be honest, I love it here. There's a huge chunk of people in the South End that look out for each other and each other's kids. There is so much negative press associated with this area, but there are great people here trying to make things better, and I want to be a part of that."

Before Saturday's gunshot death in the Mansion neighborhood, Albany's two most recent fatal shootings have occurred in the adjacent South End. In December, 19-year-old Nah-Cream Moore was killed by police on South Pearl Street when, officers say, he went to reach for a gun in his waistband. In November, Richard Gibbs, 25, was shot and killed in his car less than a block from where Moore was gunned down. Police have not arrested anyone in connection with Gibbs' death.

Another neighbor, Micheline Heath, said she has had enough.

Saturday's shooting took place right outside her Grand Street home. Sunday afternoon, she pointed out two bullet holes from Saturday's shooting on the outside of her basement apartment. One struck a wood awning, and the other shattered a chunk of windowpane. Two inches to the right and the bullet would have barreled into her living room.

"I think it's time to move out," Heath, 45, said.

Heath and her roommate were sitting on their couch watching the British horror flick "28 Days Later" when the shots rang out. They hit the floor and stayed there for about a minute. Heath said she heard people shouting expletives at each other just before the gunshots.

Heath has lived in her apartment for about a year. She said the last time there was a shooting outside her home was last summer.

"That one was different than last night," Heath said. "The one last year had to be with a semiautomatic. It was real quick, all right in a row, like 'Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!'"

Lindsey said she thought she heard two different types of gunfire Saturday night: first a shotgun, then a smaller-caliber handgun.

"You know when it's a shotgun," Lindsey said. "There's no popping noise. It's like an explosion. It just sort of echoes through the brownstones."

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