Showing posts with label East 7th Street shooting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label East 7th Street shooting. Show all posts

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Update on the East 7th Street shooting


The Times has an update on the shooting this morning on East 7th Street and Avenue D:

A gunman shot and injured a man on an East Village street early Thursday and then fired several times through the storefront of a delicatessen, striking an employee who was making coffee, the police and witnesses said. The two men were taken to Bellevue Hospital Center in serious condition, the authorities said.
The suspected gunman then got into a van and drove to a nearby police precinct on the Lower East Side, left the weapon in the vehicle and turned himself in, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said at a news briefing.Mr. Kelly said the gunfire erupted over a dispute but he had no further details.

The shooting took place about 8:15 a.m. near 278 East Seventh Street, the police said. That was the building where one of the victims, whom neighbors identified as Calvin Gibson, 50, lived. He was shot six times, the police said.
The other victim, Mohammed Islam, 18, was shot several times in the arm not long after he had opened the Jahanara delicatessen at 280 East Seventh Street, according to his brother, Sohel Arman.
Neighbors said they believed the gunman had been living with his mother in the same building as Mr. Gibson for several weeks after he lost his apartment in Chelsea.
“He was screaming, ‘Stop talking about me!’ ” said the neighbor, Aurelia Diaz, adding that she had heard the noise through her open window. She said she then heard Mr. Gibson saying “leave the kid alone” before it was quiet for about a minute.
Neighbors who knew Mr. Gibson described him as a friendly man and the vice president of a tenant’s association in the building. They said he was a co-owner of a clothing boutique called Dejavu in the East Village.

A woman who lived across the street and said she knew Mr. Gibson, Loreen Stevens, 38, heard a popping sound in the morning and parted her curtains to peer out.
She saw a man standing over Mr. Gibson, who was on the ground.
“He was hovering over him, making sure that he was hit,” she said.
“It was not like he was trying to hide what he was, or what he had just done,” she said. “To me it seemed like he was on a mission.”
The gunman then turned toward the deli and started firing through the glass. There were four holes in the storefront.
Ms. Stevens said she ran across the street but the gunman had gone. She went to Mr. Gibson, who was lying on his side.
“He told me, ‘I was just going to get coffee,’ ” she said. “He kept moving around.”
“I was like, you’re going to be O.K.,” she said. “He kept tossing and turning.”
Ms. Stevens said that Mr. Gibson said he was in pain and kept repeating “4-D, 4-D.”