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ALL NINE PEOPLE wounded in a New York shoot-out between a gunman who killed a former co-worker and officers who responded to the incident were hit by police fire, officials said today.
The shoot-out erupted yesterday morning in front of the iconic Empire State Building in the heart of Manhattan after Jeffrey Johnson, a former employee at a women’s apparel business, killed a former colleague.
Nine people were wounded in the melee, all by friendly fire, police chief Raymond Kelly told reporters.
“It appears that all nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired by the police,” he said.
Three of the wounded were still in stable condition in hospital today, a police spokeswoman said.
Kelly had earlier identified Johnson, 58, as a “disgruntled former worker” from a women’s apparel business called Hazan Imports who had been laid off about a year ago.
Johnson returned to his former workplace on Friday morning, where he got into an argument with the company’s vice president of sales, 41-year-old Steven Ercolino, before shooting him in the head three times.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Johnson later turned the gun on police when they moved to arrest him, leading them to open fire.
It was the second fatal police shooting in Manhattan in less than two weeks. On 11 August police shot dead a man with a knife who was resisting arrest in Times Square.
- (c) AFP, 2012
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“Friendly fire still burns.”
Remind me of the start of Team America
F€#k ya !
At least they don’t hide it. If this was ireland, we’d have a 5 year tribunal resulting in no definitive conclusion.
The Irish police hid nothing either
For those of you who have never stood in the line of fire. It ain’t easy. Give em a break.
The cops weren’t in the line of fire, he fired three times and hit his boss with all three as far as I know, I’ll assume you were in the army at some point, I doubt you would have been let away with such poor accuracy?
He turned the gun on the police.
He fired 3 times and killed his target, turned the gun on cops, officers at the scene first said he didn’t fire on them. Hence it was a shoot down not a shoot out. 9 of 14 police bullets hit innocent people walking by. The range was around 8 or 9 feet according to one of the victims.
trigger happy cops
Maybe they were a easy with the gun fire but what did you expect them to do? Ask him nicely to stop?
Bit easy that is.
@ John you could expect them to hit the person with the gun? they had a 9:1 innocent bystander to suspect ratio, if that happened anywhere else it’d be a human rights fiasco
@ John Mc,
Standard issue 9mm rounds are not able to kill past 50m but they are still able to cause injuries. Stress and physical exercise can cause an increase in the shooters heart rate which can cause aimed shots to easily miss their target, even for professional target shooters. Add to it the lack of optics on a pistol bar a small iron sight and a crowded new york street and you have the perfect condition for incidental injuries.
Not the fault of the responding officers, they did what was needed to be done.
Cops should be tested for steroid use. Not saying its the case here but there is a growing trend in the US of people been murdered by police although i dont envy their job.
Aren’t they supposed to train for this exact situation? One guy was hit from 8 feet so I don’t see the relevance of the range affecting performance. There are records of people getting hits from greater ranges with pistols
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g1n8cmwhIY&feature=player_detailpage
Also is it not part of their job not to take shots that aren’t clear? If the shooters were people with a concealed carry permit (in another city in the states) and not cops we’d have a huge gun control row going on now. I don’t accept the doing what needed to be done argument in this case, looks more like a panic reaction by the cops than unintentional damage caused by trained professionals
lots of red thumbs… is it acceptable to kill NINE innocent people? 1 or 2 can be an accident. you cant just go into a crowd blasting people. disgraceful behavior.
only a few weeks ago a guy with a knife resisting arrest got shot dead aswell……. the gardai here would have dealt with this without guns.
Tell that to Gardai Byrne, Moriarty and McCallion, to name but a few.
@John : you could expect, given that they have to spend a certain amount of time on the range each year, that they would hit the target.
@Jason : Er, no. Just about every thing you just said is incredibly inaccurate. The lethal range of a 9mm round is usually cited (it’s an imprecise sort of thing because it depends on who it hits, where it hits them and a few thousand other variables) as being several hundred metres and its maximum range is something like 1800 metres and it could cause injuries right out to almost the full 1800. Oh, and while we’re at it? Professional target shooters DO NOT SHOOT AT HUMANS. Target shooting is a sport, it has as much to do with shooting people as Katie Taylor has to do with two drunks beating each others heads in outside a kebab shop after the pubs close.
Could have shot him in the head and be done with it, how many cops missed to have 9 others hit
Imbeciles being given guns.
Thank god they were trained professionals…
i must admit when i heard this story and people where saying another mass shouting. i did think this could be a police cock up. i don’t know full story but his sums up America attude to guns. shoot first ask questions latter
You weren’t there man!!!!
need to aim first then shoot ask questions later
If someone was pointing a gun at me I wouldn’t be inclined to pause to ask him anything – I’d be too busy trying to shoot him before he shot me…
They need a bit of target practice I’d say . Off to the range for a day
A bit? …A lot!
Not a day by the looks of things, a year!
Yes John mac. Your right I am a soldier. And again your right, I. Would not be let off with poor accuracy. A certain standard is required when you are expected to stand on a street with a loaded weapon. Be it bank escorts or prisoner escorts. All I’m saying is from experience, I know it is much easier to do things in training than when a situation is tense and there are real dangers involved. I’m not trying to excuse what happened at all. Just saying ” it ain’t easy”.
Not arguing with you at all there Gerry, just from the way it looks at the minute they could have acted with more restraint and got a better result
Or they could have acted with restraint and got themselves killed….
I’m not defending them for what happened, but until you are standing there with someone pointing a gun at you its hard to know how you might react when your self-preservation instinct kicks in.
Not totally dissimilar to what happened an SA earlier in the week…
Or, Mattoid, the NYPD could have done their job. Their job is not to protect themselves, but to protect the public.
And what happened in South Africa during the week was murder. Police could have shot warning shots or shot to wound the miners instead they killed them. A police force is meant to be there to protect the citizens of a land not to protect big business, in this case a mining company exploiting South African workers and South Africa. I’m actually sorry for the policemen in SA. They’ve been used by by a government obviously “on the take” and sold their souls in the process.
You’re so right wing Mattoid I’m surprised your comments stay on the screen.
And John Mc – fair play to you. Thumbs up for every comment on this thread.
@Under the radar
Thanks for the casual right wing insult but unfortunately you’re totally wrong there buddy (presumably you think that those of a right wing leaning don’t deserve to have their opinions heard though – doesn’t that sound more than a little right wing in itself??). I have said in another thread that the mineworkers are being disgracefully exploited in SA, but that is a different issue.
The point is, whether you are faced with either a group of charging mineworkers about to attack you with spears, machetes and pistols (the same men who had already killed several of your colleagues and other miners), or an armed man on the streets of New York pointing his weapon at you, and you have literally a split second to react, your self-preservation instinct kicks in and you do what you have to do to protect yourself.
That is what humans are hardwired to do after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and cops (contrary to what you might like to think) are human too. Like it or not, that is the reality here and all the training in the world cannot trump the natural instinct to survive.
Yes, the cops in NY shot inaccurately and wounded several members of the public and they will have to live with that until their dying day, but until you’re faced with a situation like that yourself, how do you know how you would react? You could remove yourself from the gene pool very quickly by hesitating.
Any talk of shooting to wound is best saved for Hollywood or for hostage situations (you may have been influenced by a youtube video where a sniper shoots the pistol from the hand of a seated hostage taker, but this is far from the norm and became so well known on youtube purely because it was so exceptional).
Hollow points used to fragment on impact cause maximum damage and less chance of passing through a body hitting person behind them but if bullet hits solid object instead of bouncing it fragments and bits go everywhere. Not nypds fault as much as you would all blame them
That’s not really how they work James. You get hit with a 9mm round at a range of 8 or 9 feet and it doesn’t matter what bit of you it hits, it is not going to bounce off you.
This is the cctv from the shooting. They are literally five feet away and fire a total of 14 rounds managing to miss him at least 8 times and hit other people!!! Terrible, terrible accuracy no matter how stressful the situation may be and they are very lucky not to have killed anyone..
Desk jobs is where these lads should be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W8cHwNuqH4&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Super comment Rory…and the supporting link is great..
You should join up the world would be a safer place
A dangerous individual is dead anyway so what’s the harm?
He was probably a hard working lad like the rest of us but unfortunately was pushed to his limits and snapped just like Michael Douglas’s character in the movie ‘Falling Down’…
Ah, in fairness, I can’t argue with that, but if a he killed once, he’d do it again… that’s just my opinion.
probably would have been himself next time.
@David
I don’t think he’s quite like the rest of us – well not me anyway…
Back to Police Academy fellas…more accuracy & precision training required..
Sharp shooters
I’d have expected “I don’t have a clean shot” instead of shooting a pistol at a target where there was high possibility of people beyond the target being hit with ballistics or fragments. 1 or 2 victims perhaps but 9 is unacceptable for a supposed trained police force. Bound to Desk duty for those cops with extensive urban retraining is what’s needed.
you’d be surprised just how ineffective handguns are in a shootout. only really effective at close quarters up to 10 meters.
You’d think the cops would know that.
Show of hands how many here have been ever been involved in a situation like this?
It’s a pity they did not approach the suspect with weapons drawn and clear voice commands to get on the ground. But they probably second guessed themselves and did not want to point their weapons at an innocent pedestrian.
When they realized he was the the shooter he already had his weapon drawn and had the advantage on the the police, looks like they were shocked and had a delayed reaction responding to the threat.
They are both very lucky to be alive, a situation like that happens very quick and is very intense. They will probably be haunted by taking that mans life and the shooting of the innocent bystanders for the rest of their lives.
Very brave and courages for them to stay in the fight and not run away scared. However, I was not there and neither were you. Now they have to make peace with their actions.
What would you do in that situation? Or would you even put your life on the line to protect people you don’t know or who do not like you? How many times have you walked through Dublin and observed a criminal act but chose to mind your own business and not get involved?
Great comment – too many armchair analysts, just as there were for Abbeylara.
We are very lucky to live in a country where our main familiarity with weapons comes from movies, mates or sometimes a firing range. This does lead to annoying generalizations and arm chair analysts who are very quick to put blame on anyone with a uniform.
Im sure a full investigation will be done into the conduct of these officers and the decision they made to fire each round and whether they could have effected an angle change to reduce risk to life. Far more detail and evidence is needed to make a judgement on this than is available from one news article or even one solitary eyewitness.
If these officers believed the man was about to open fire they had every right to fire first to protect their own lives and Im pretty sure that the knowledge that they hurt innocents will weigh heavy on them. The fact is there MAY have been little else they could do but become casualties themselves.
Pistols were obviously not ideal for longer range engagements in crowded spaces. Maybe they should have had different kit available?
It would be nice if people had more of an interest in US foreign policy as it may affect them than becoming ‘experts’ on what they should be doing with their own constitution within their own borders. We would be up in arms (Or rather moaning in capital letters online) about such ignorant speculation on our own constitution whether it was correct or not. I think we should be shocked at such incidents occurring, be interested in the outcome and stop tarring an entire nation with the same brush.
Mattoid, I agree there are too many “arm chair analysistis”. I am not one of those, I assure you. I have been in situations where gunfire was coming from places where I would rather it was not. And had to deal with that. It dident always work and friends of mine died. I’m not looking for attention here, and I’m certainly not excusing the outcome of what happened in New York. I’m just saying that when the s@! t hits the fan, people react very differently, and No One can tell how you will react. At this stage, and having looked at the footage of the CCTV, I don’t know what I would have done. I know what I would like to have done, or even think I am capable of doing. But in reality, even now, after 30 years of being a soldier, and having faced gunfire ( quite a bit :)) I still think that every situation is different. And there are many factors that come into play when it happens. As I said on my first post. “it ain’t easy”. Sorry if im boring people here. Ye can look at my Facebook page, an know I’m not a bullshittr.
Gerry, my ‘armchair experts’ comment was certainly not directed at you – in fact quite the opposite. You’re probably the best-qualified person on the whole thread to pass comment.
It was directed at commenters who were very quick to condemn those involved whilst not having a clue what it is actually like to be facing a situation like that and having to make a split second decision where the wrong decision (or indeed hesitation to make any decision) could kill you.
Hmm
Pip, shooting to wound is not always possible. Time, position and above all “backdrop” are all very Important. Backdrop is where your round (bullet) will end up, or the fragments thereof. It’s a very hard thing to do in seconds. Sometimes it works ( if you are calm, and very good) but most often, even the most experiencend people get it wrong. It happens. Unfortunatly.
Gerry when I got two red thumbs for stating a fact, shoot center mass. Do you think that was because they don’t like reality or they don’t believe me. With all your years of training how many times have you heard the sheap dog analogy?
I find it gas to read some valid interesting points made but yet they still manage to get 30 thumbs down.
Aren’t they supposed to shoot to wound . not shoot to kill. and that is just a question. I though that they had to wound where possible unless in a dire situation!
On the other hand, New York City is gonna have massive law suits against them.
Shot center mass, to stop the threat.
No they are not. They shoot to Stop and the best way to do that is centre mass shots
The state took a citizens life and the agency responsible did not testify at the enquiry. If that’s not covering up what is? I lived in new York for some time and within a short time, there will be a public inquiry to this event
I presume by ‘agency responsible’ you mean An Garda Siochana and that by ‘enquiry’ you are referring to the Barr tribunal. If so, may I suggest that you check your facts again as the Gardai did in fact give evidence to the tribunal and, despite what you say Justice Barr, though finding fault with the way Gardai dealt with the whole incident, made no comments concerning any ‘cover up’ or attempted cover up. That is just absurd.
Read the report its on the net for all to see. Try and educate yourself a little before mouthing rubbish that people can very easily disprove
@mattoid, Abbeylara was a different situation. It lasted 20 hours and was mismanaged at length by those in charge and distorted and covered up afterward. The ES shooting was an immediate situation that turned into a mess in a few seconds
Says who? A Judge a few barristers looking to make a few quid.
“Distorted and covered up”. How?
@Jason.
I’d like to know how the unfortunate Abbeylara incident was ‘distorted and covered up afterward’ as well.
Jason, I agree the Abbeylara siege was mishandled on many levels, and many opportunities were missed.
The point I’m making is that after all the prior failures, the situation was that the gardai were faced with a man armed with a shotgun advancing towards them (and civilian journalists), a man who even his family acknowledge was mentally unstable at the time, a man who had already discharged shots at gardai during the siege, and a man who had ignored orders to stop or lower his weapon.
What do you suggest the gardai should have done? Can you imagine the outcry if they failed to tackle him and he went on to shoot an unarmed civilian? You can’t have it both ways! These are the kind of nightmare scenarios that these men are called on to deal with, and I for one am glad that they’re there when required.
I disagree with with gun law in America, too many guns as of right. Then in Ireland gun death is quite common, sometimes one a day, our police force almost never kill even the crimnal. A good policy is a lot better than retraining especially when the law gives you a right to carry a leathal weapon in public even in a non threatening envoirenment.
First of all, I am not anti Garda, I have great respect for them and think they do a difficult job very well. Secondly, the blame for those killed in NY lies with the guy who shot his ex boss, if you walk around threatening people with a weapon you take your life in your own hands. I was living in NY while the Barr tribunal was being held and it was widely reported(perhaps incorrectly) that there was a refusal to testify. This was said to be the reason it took so long to complete the report. And yes , Guards were found to have lied by the tribunal
I’m sorry but can you please direct me to the section of the Barr Tribunal report or your source where it says that the Gardai were shown to be lying. Thanks.
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