One of the two victims is dead. New York police are appealing for witnesses to locate a suspect after two homeless people sleeping rough were gunshot victims on the morning of Saturday March 12, an “awful” crime for Mayor Eric Adams.
According to initial investigations, a suspect first fired a gun at a 38-year-old man who was found injured but alive in the early morning hours in Lower Manhattan. Then, a little before 5 p.m. Saturday (11 p.m. in France), in the same neighborhood, the police found another lifeless man in his sleeping bag, wounded in the head and neck. According to CCTV footage, the suspect shot him around 6 a.m. while he was sleeping, shortly after the first incident.
“These acts are clear and they are awful,” Democratic Mayor Eric Adams lamented on Saturday evening. “Two people were shot for sleeping on the street. They weren’t committing a crime, they were sleeping on the streets,” he said. The mayor and the police called on the tens of thousands of homeless people in New York to avoid sleeping on the streets and to join emergency accommodation services for the city of nearly 9 million people.
But according to several media, including the NBC New York site, citing police sources, a third homeless man was found dead Sunday shortly before 7 p.m. local time, still in Lower Manhattan. A spokesperson for the NYPD, the New York police, initially only confirmed to AFP that a man had been found dead, with “possible gunshot wounds” and that it “appears” that it is a homeless person.
