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WHAT HAPPENED AT THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING
POSTED BY ALEX KOPPELMAN
Every day, somewhere in the United States, someone is shot and killed—lots of someones, really. It’s not an uncommon thing. This summer, though, it seems to be happening with an eerie regularity. A new week, a new high-profile shooting incident. There may, truth be told, not be anything different about this summer, but it feels like there is. These things have a momentum. And today, another shooting. Another two people —one of them the gunman—dead, and nine more wounded. Another grisly scene.
But there’s something different about this shooting. It is, from what we know now—the details are still somewhat sketchy—not the work of someone who intended to kill multiple people, the way the gunmen in Aurora, Colorado, and Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C., did. Eleven people were hit in midtown Manhattan today, but it appears that the shooter—the fifty-eight-year-old Jeffrey Johnson—may have only shot one of them. The rest, it seems, may have been shot by the two police officers trying to bring Johnson down.
Johnson was laid off from his job at Hazan Imports, at 10 West Thirty-third Street, near the Empire State Building, last year. He returned today, apparently seeking his old boss, Steven Ercolino, with whom he’d had an ongoing dispute. Their final confrontation ended with Johnson shooting multiple times, killing him. Photos shot by a bystanders—this is New York City in the age of the smartphone—show a man who appears to be Ercolino. He’s lying on the sidewalk, his body twisted, facing away from the camera. There’s a lot of blood, covering his head and pooling beneath and beside it; it is still bright red. He is dead or dying. But his backpack is off to the side, upright, as if placed there carefully, and beyond it are the feet of perhaps a dozen onlookers. Three hours later, around noon, the bystanders had been chased away from the immediate area, and police shooed away any reporter who managed to slip in, but before they did so, what appeared to be Ercolino’s body could be seen, still in the same spot. There was the familiar white covering and the shape, with personnel from the medical examiner’s office bent over it.
After Johnson killed Ercolino, he headed toward the Empire State Building—bound for where, we may not ever know. But two construction workers followed him, and alerted two police officers who were on the scene there. According to Ray Kelly, the commissioner of the N.Y.P.D., when those officers went to confront Johnson, he pulled his gun again—a .45-calibre weapon, with a magazine capable of holding eight bullets at a time.
Marc Engel, an accountant who was riding the M34 bus eastbound, on his way to a meeting, heard the shots from the bus, which stopped in the intersection by the firefight, and saw some of the wounded. The whole thing lasted “fifteen seconds,” he guessed not long afterward. “Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop, one shot after another… By the time I got down, the shooting was over.”
There are still conflicting reports about what happened. We know that the officers fired sixteen rounds; we know they killed Johnson. We know that nine other people were wounded. But we don’t know for sure if Johnson ever pulled the trigger. Already, when they briefed reporters on Friday morning, Kelly and Mayor Mike Bloomberg were suggesting that at least some of the nine might have been hit by shots fired by the officers. In the afternoon, the Times was reporting “that most or all of the bystanders were struck by one of the 16 police bullets—or fragments or ricochets from those rounds—that were fired by the two officers” and that, at most, Johnson fired at the officers only once.
In New York City, with Kelly’s police department, that will raise questions. Nine civilians were going about their business in an area that is always crowded with tourists, and then they were shot as police tried to bring down one man. There are, of course, cases in which officers in New York have acted with excessive force and shot people they shouldn’t have. This, however, doesn’t appear to be one of them.
David Klinger, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and senior research scientist at the Police Foundation who studies officer-involved shootings (and who himself, as a rookie cop in Los Angeles, had to shoot and kill a suspect who was attacking his partner) says it appears that the officers did the right thing.
“The proper procedure is to do whatever you can to stop the suspect as quickly as possible before he shoots anybody, either yourself or innocent citizens,” Klinger said. “The officer has to stop the threat.” Waiting, he notes, could have meant Johnson shooting the officers, leaving no one else around to stop him from hurting others. Or it could have given him time to take a hostage.
“I’m sympathetic to the idea that maybe they could talk” to the suspect and try to end the situation peacefully, Klinger said. “But it takes a fraction of a second, literally, to bring a gun to bear and fire. If the gun is already brought to bear, the fraction of a second is even less.”
Things might have been different a couple decades ago. But that was before Columbine, before more people were killed because officers waited before going in, rather than trying to end things immediately.
The old way of doing things “was really dumb, because we let people get murdered,” Klinger says. So since Columbine, “the operational doctrine of American law enforcement has shifted away from ‘he’s probably going to stop’ … to ‘someone who is in a public space where there are multiple victims available needs to be stopped as quickly as possible.’”
Those people who support ever more unfettered access to guns would agree, no doubt, and suggest that an armed citizenry could play an invaluable role in stopping shooters like this. But in this case, two trained officers were the ones who took down Johnson; in the process, nine civilians were wounded. How many more would it have been if those officers had just been amateurs off the street?
_________________ The Hawk wrote: There is not a damned thing wrong with people who are bull shitters.
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