Records reveal gun arrests for suspect in Monroeville police shooting

The man accused of shooting a Monroeville police sergeant after robbing a cookie shop Wednesday night is a convicted criminal with a history of arrests on gun charges dating back nearly a decade.

Jamal Brooks, who is charged with wounding the sergeant while spraying his marked police car with 16 bullets, has tangled with police in Pittsburgh and its suburbs over the years. He was also swept up in an investigation by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, court records show.

Brooks, 32, of Aliquippa, has been arrested for illegally storing guns in his house, pistol-whipping a woman, putting a gun to another woman’s head and robbing an entertainer at gunpoint while wearing a ski mask, according to evidence introduced in federal court.

“It seems to me that you have some relationship with guns that you can’t abandon, and those guns are being used to commit dangerous crimes,” a U.S. magistrate judge told him at a September 2017 detention hearing in the ATF case, according to a court transcript.

Brooks was being held in the Allegheny County Jail Friday without bond. Authorities initially had trouble identifying him and did not release his name until two days after the attack. He is scheduled for a preliminary hearing Monday.

The officer Brooks is accused of shooting was recovering from surgery at Forbes Hospital in Monroeville. Police have not identified him. He was shot after police said he confronted a suspect in the armed robbery of a Crumbl Cookie shop in the Miracle Mile Shopping Center on William Penn Highway.

Records of Brooks’ involvement with gun violence start on April 19, 2015, when Brooks, then 24, was accused of pointing a gun at the head of a former neighbor in Pittsburgh’s Garfield section during a dispute over parking, then firing gunshots into her friend’s car. The case was dropped when the victim didn’t appear in court, according to testimony from an ATF agent.

Two weeks after the parking argument, Brooks, sporting a ski mask and armed with a silver pistol, robbed a man after he had performed at a Pittsburgh-area nightclub, according to court records. Police recovered a pistol that had been sold to Brooks, the ATF agent testified. That case was also dropped because of an unwilling victim.

In May 2015, Frazer police called to a Walmart charged Brooks with possessing a firearm without a license, retail theft, conspiracy and making false identification to police, court records show. Brooks pleaded guilty to all four charges and was sentenced in 2016 to one year of probation. That crime made him ineligible to legally own a gun.

In 2017, Brooks held a pistol to a woman’s head then knocked her unconscious with it, according to court records. Investigators said that Brooks and an accomplice fired three shots when the woman’s husband arrived. Several guns registered to Brooks were found in a vehicle that fled the crime scene, according to the ATF agent’s testimony — along with a federal application to purchase a firearm and a 50-round drum magazine for ammunition.

That incident led ATF agents to raid Brooks’ Aliquippa home in August 2017. Agents found two Glock pistols, both loaded, on a bedroom closet shelf and a Smith & Wesson AR-15-style rifle in a basement storage area. Two children were in the home.

After charges were filed, a grand jury returned a one-count indictment against Brooks on firearm possession. Brooks pleaded guilty and was sentenced him to 17 months in federal prison and two years of supervised release.

Court records show Brooks, after his time in prison on the federal firearms charge, violated the terms of his supervised release. In 2019, Avalon police arrested him for possession of a firearm and marijuana.

An officer who had pulled over Brooks on March 21, 2019 found a Ruger semi-automatic weapon in the center console of his car, court records show. Two marijuana joints burned in the car’s ashtray. The next year, a federal judge added two additional years of probation to Brooks’ sentence.

People living at Garfield and Aliquippa addresses Brooks had listed in court documents as his residence did not return calls or messages placed through social media.

Turtle Creek attorney David B. Chontos, who represented Brooks on the federal firearms charge, also did not return calls Friday.

Wearing a bushy beard and standing 5-foot-5, Brooks has been portrayed by his lawyers in earlier court cases as a “devoted partner and father” with a strong family support system in the Pittsburgh area. In the 2017 federal detention hearing, Brooks’ lawyer said that his mother would take him in.

The judge declined the offer.

“The concern here,” Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan told Brooks, “is you have a history of gun violence.”

It remains unclear who is representing Brooks on the Monroeville charges. No attorney is listed in his current court docket, which on Friday remained labeled “LNU, FNU” — last name unknown, first name unknown.