Global Courant
A man used a motorized scooter to move from victim to victim during a Saturday shooting in New York City that ended with one dead, three injured and a suspect in custody, police said.
The seemingly random attacks in Brooklyn and Queens began at 11:10 a.m., police said, and officially ended exactly two hours later with the arrest of a suspect in the latter borough, police said.
The man, identified only as a 25-year-old with a previous arrest, had a 9mm semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine and an “illegal” scooter with no license plates, New York Police Department First Deputy Commissioner Edward Caban said. at a press conference.
The suspect is not responding to detectives and appears to be suffering from emotional or mental problems, police sources said. However, it is not clear if he was assessed by a mental health professional.
The victim of the first attack was described as a 21-year-old man who was shot from behind in Brooklyn and is expected to survive, assistant chief Joseph Kenny said at the news conference.
Seventeen minutes later, an 87-year-old man was shot in the back about three miles away in Queens, police said. He was rushed to a hospital where he died, they said.
“The perpetrator was described as a man on a scooter who fired into a nail salon on Jamaica Avenue,” Kenny said.
At much the same location, but in a separate attack, a shot was fired, but no one was hit, police said. “Numerous witnesses described that the man on a scooter fired randomly at a group of people standing on the corner,” the assistant chief said.
Less than a mile away, also in Queens, a 44-year-old man standing on a street corner was shot in the face, police said. He was hospitalized in critical condition.
A few blocks away, at 11:37 a.m., the last victim known to police, described as a 63-year-old man, was shot in the shoulder, police said. He was stabilized at a hospital, they said.
Four shell casings were found at that location, they said. Other scenes also showed multiple 9mm shell casings, they said.
A blurry security camera image of a suspect on a scooter was sent to “every cop on the street,” Kenny said.
NBC New York reported that the image was sent to officers as part of a system that will sound an alarm on their devices until they acknowledge seeing it.
At 1:10 p.m., about 10 blocks from the latest attack, the 25-year-old suspect was taken into custody by officers who recognized him from the security footage, police said.
It was not clear what the suspect was doing in the more than 90 minutes since the last shooting.
Caban said detectives are investigating the origin of the firearm and the possibility that it is a ghost weapon, a term that describes weapons that can be 3D printed from composite material and put into service without required serial numbers or usual background checks.
The biggest mystery seemed to be the motive.
“At this point, we don’t know the motive,” Kenny said. “It seems like it’s actually random when you look at the demographics and pedigree of the victims. They’re all different at the moment.”
The nonprofit organization Everytown, which pushes for evidence-based gun regulation, argues that random shootings are probably less common than thought: The attacker in nearly half of all mass shootings in the United States is a partner, ex-partner, or relative of a of the victims.
Everytown defines a mass shooting as a shooting that kills four or more people. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings in the United States, defines a mass shooting as a shooting in which four victims, not counting the shooter, are injured or killed by gunfire.
It regards the violence in New York Saturday morning as a mass shooting. According to the archive, there have been more than 360 mass shootings under that definition since the beginning of the year.
Myles Miller, Jonathan Dienst, Courtney Brogle, Ava Kelley and Michelle Acevedo contributed.
