A man used a motorized scooter to move from one victim to another in a spate of shootings in New York City on Saturday that left 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 a suspect arrested in Queens, police said.
The man, identified only as a 25-year-old with a prior arrest, had a 9mm semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine and an “illegal” scooter with no license plates, NYPD First Deputy Commissioner Edward Caban said. at a press conference.
The suspect has not responded to detectives and appears to be suffering from emotional or mental problems, police sources said. However, it is not clear if he has been evaluated by a mental health professional.
The victim of the first attack was described as a 21-year-old man shot in the back in Brooklyn and expected to survive, Deputy 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 shooting up a nail salon on Jamaica Avenue,” Kenny said.
At almost the same location, but in a separate attack, a shot was fired but no one was injured, police said. “Numerous witnesses described the man on a scooter randomly shooting at a group of people who were 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 bullet casings were found at that scene, they said. Other scenes also featured multiple 9mm 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 detained by officers who recognized him from security footage, police said.
It was unclear what the suspect had been up to in the more than 90 minutes since the last shooting.
Caban said detectives are looking into the origin of the firearm and the possibility that it is a ghost gun, a term that describes weapons that can be 3D printed from composite material and put to use without the required serial numbers or markings. regular background checks.
The biggest mystery seemed to be the reason.
“At this point, we don’t know why,” Kenny said. “It seems like it’s actually random if you look at the demographics and the pedigree of the victims. Everyone is different right now.”
The nonprofit Everytown, which urges evidence-based gun regulation, says random shootings are probably less common than people think: The attacker in nearly half of all mass shootings in the United States is a partner, former partner or relative of one of the victims
Everytown defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are killed. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings in the United States, defines a mass shooting as one with four victims, not including the shooter, who is injured or killed by gunshots.
He counts the violence in New York on Saturday morning as a mass shooting. There have been more than 360 mass shootings under that definition since the beginning of the year, according to the file.
miles miller, jonathan dienst, Courtney Brogle, ava kelley and Michelle Acevedo contributed.
