The incident appeared at first to be another in a line of recent shootings until it emerged that the police were actually directly responsible for the vast majority of the violence, injuring nine people.
Thankfully, the police did not mortally wound any of the innocent
bystanders, but they still unloaded a whopping 14 rounds between them
before killing Jeffrey Johnson, the former accessories designer who
murdered his former boss Steve Ercolino.
According to
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, “it appears that all
nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired
by police.”
After the shooting first occurred on Friday, August 24, 2012, it was
unclear if it was Johnson or the officers who were responsible for the
nine bystanders left bleeding on the sidewalk but based on the ballistic
and other evidence, it appears that Kelly is now quite certain who
fired the rounds.
Now one of the wounded pedestrians, named Robert Asika, has accused the police of “shooting randomly” into the street, which is a quite serious allegation indeed.
Asika was unlucky enough to be shot in the elbow by one of the police officers from a mere eight feet away while he was selling tickets for tour buses and the Empire State Building’s observation deck.
He started only a week ago after being unemployed
for more than a year and did not hesitate to criticize how the police
handled the incident, saying, “If you’re gonna aim try and aim
perfectly. If you wanna aim at the target, you got to know what you’re
doing because it’s the street. I could have been dead right now. I could
have been dead.”
“I was just standing there and I saw people running. I didn’t want to
run because I wanted to know why people were running so I turned around
and I saw this guy,” Asika continued, referring to Johnson.
“He was suited up, he had like a tie and a briefcase. If you see him, you’d probably think he was like a doctor, or maybe a lawyer, a business guy,” said Asika. “He just looked like a normal guy.”
Asika witnessed this soon after Johnson murdered 41-year-old Ercolino
with whom he “had a history of workplace squabbles” before being fired,
at one point they even “grappled physically in an elevator.”
According to police, three people were hit by whole bullets while the
rest of the nine victims were grazed by what Kelly called “fragments of
some sort.”
Officer Craig Matthews fired seven of the bullets while Officer
Robert Sinishtaj fired nine and interestingly enough, both officers had
never discharged their weapon on patrol before.
There does not seem to be any reports of the two officers, both
15-year veterans of the NYPD, being suspended or having any action taken
against them as of yet.