Sylvie Claire / March 14, 2022
An individual suspected of killing several homeless people over the weekend in New York City is currently being sought by law enforcement. A call for witnesses has been launched.
New York police are appealing for witnesses to locate a suspect after two homeless men sleeping on the street were shot Saturday morning, one of whom died.
According to initial investigations, a suspect first fired a gun at a 38-year-old man who was found wounded but alive in the early morning hours in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood. Then, just before 5 p.m. Saturday, in the same neighborhood, police found another man lifeless in his sleeping bag with head and neck injuries.
According to video surveillance footage, the suspect shot him around 6:00 a.m.while he was sleeping, shortly after the first incident.
These acts are clear and they are awful, Democratic Mayor Eric Adams lamented Saturday night. Two people were shot because they were sleeping in the street. They were not committing a crime, they were sleeping in the street, he denounced.
Eric Adams and the police called on the tens of thousands of homeless people in New York City to avoid sleeping on the streets and to join the emergency shelter services in the city of nearly 9 million people.
But according to several media outlets, including NBC New York, citing police sources, a third homeless man was found dead Sunday shortly before 7 p.m. local time, also in Lower Manhattan.
New York has a large number of homeless people sleeping on the streets, and the Democratic mayor, who took office on January 1, announced a plan in mid-February to remove those who take up residence in the gigantic underground subway system, especially in winter when temperatures frequently drop below freezing. Eric Adams was reacting to a series of criminal acts that made the news, including the death of a woman pushed onto the subway tracks by a mentally ill homeless man.
His plan was not well received by some organizations, including the Coalition for the Homeless, which responded that people move to the subway because they have no better place to go. Despite the headlines, New York's homeless are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators, the association added on Sunday, calling on the mayor to recognize that his policies put them at risk.
Photos of the suspect were released. A $25,000 bounty is promised by the D.C. police to anyone who can provide information about the killer. The bounty is $10,000 in New York.