A scooter-riding gunman killed an 87-year-old man and wounded three others in a string of random shootings across two New York City boroughs, police said on Saturday.
A 25-year-old man was taken into custody without incident, and his identity was not revealed by police, Assistant Police Chief Joseph Kenny said at a news conference. A 9 mm handgun with an extended magazine and a scooter were recovered.
The New York Police Department pulled an image of the gunman from a video and sent it to officers' phones, some of whom spotted the suspect about two hours after the first shooting.
“We don’t know the motive. It seems his acts were random,” Kenny said.
In all, the NYPD said there were five shootings during the spree by someone on a scooter. One was in Brooklyn, and four were in Queens. No one was injured in theshooting.
The scooter used by the gunmen
The shooting began around 11:10 a.m. when someone on a scooter shot a 21-year-old man in the shoulder in Brooklyn. He was brought to a hospital and is expected to survive, police said.
Seventeen minutes later, an 87-year-old man was shot multiple times in the Richmond Hill area of Queens. He later died in a hospital.
Shortly afterwards, in Queens, witnesses reported a man on a scooter firing randomly into a group of people, although nobody was hurt. Eight minutes later, a 44-year-old man was shot in the face. He was in critical condition at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.
About one minute later, a 63-year-old man was shot in the torso. He was in stable condition at the hospital.
Killings in the nation’s most populous city have recently risen to about where they were a decade ago—well below an early-1990s peak. The number of gunshot victims surged in New York City during the pandemic and remainshigh. The city has also suffered from a series of high-profile crimes.
Mayor Eric Adams, a former New York City police captain, stresses the importance of getting guns off the streets.
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