Shooting outside the Empire State Building causes chaos
Police blame a dispute between two former colleagues for a fatal shooting outside New York’s Empire State Building which shocked tourists and created chaos around the tourist attraction.
Two people were killed and at least eight wounded in a shooting outside the Empire State Building on Friday, a New York police source said.
One of the dead was the gunman, the source said, adding there was no apparent link to terrorism.
Police commissioner Raymond Kelly has identified the gunman as Jeffery Johnson, a disgruntled ex-employee of Hazan Imports.
It is thought that other person who died was someone the shooter had a grievance against. The nature of the grievance was not known.
“Pop, pop, pop”
“I heard the gunshots. It was like pop, pop, pop. It was definitely in a bunch,” said Dahlia Anister, 33, who works at an office near the 102-story Empire State Building.
The shooting started shortly after 0900 local time on Fifth Avenue outside the building. Police cordoned off the area around the building.
Mail courier James Bolden, 31, said he saw a “guy laying on the (sidewalk), bleeding from the neck and barely breathing.”
“Everybody was crowded around him taking pictures and video, and security guys were yelling everybody to get back, and give him space. He was barely breathing,” Mr Bolden said.
One witness said she saw a woman who was shot in the foot and another woman being taken away in an ambulance.
Not know to police
“I was walking down 33rd (Street) and there’s a dead guy. I just saw pools of blood. He was laying down and the was blood pooling (around him),” Justin Kellis, 35, who works nearby.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the injured people were expected to survive and added that some may have been shot accidentally by police.
The mayor revealed that the gunman does not appear to have a criminal record. “We don’t know too much about him,” he said.
The United States has had two other mass shooting cases this summer. On 20 July, a gunman opened fire at a midnight screening of the Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and wounding 58.
On 5 August, a gunman killed six people and critically wounded three at a Sikh temple outside Milwaukee before police shot him dead in an attack authorities treated as an act of domestic terrorism.