A man used a motorized scooter to go from victim to victim in a shooting in New York City on Saturday that left one dead, three injured and a suspect in custody, police said.
The apparently random attacks in Brooklyn and Queens began at 11:10 a.m., police said, and officially ended exactly two hours later with a suspect arrested in the last neighborhood, police said.
The man, identified only as a 25-year-old with a prior arrest, had a 9mm semi-automatic handgun with an extended magazine and an “illegal” scooter with no license plates, said NYPD First Deputy , Edward Caban, in a press conference.
The suspect has not responded to detectives and appears to be suffering from emotional or mental problems, police sources said. However, it is unclear whether he has been evaluated by a mental health professional.
The victim in the first attack was described as a 21-year-old man who was shot in the back in Brooklyn and was expected to survive, Deputy Chief Joseph Kenny said at the news conference.
Seventeen minutes later, an 87-year-old man was shot in the back about two miles away in Queens, police said. He was rushed to a hospital where he died, they said.
“The assailant was described as a man on a scooter shooting into a nail salon on Jamaica Avenue,” Kenny said.
At nearly the same location, but in another attack, a shot was fired, but no one was hit, police said. “Numerous witnesses described the man on a scooter shooting randomly at a group of people standing on the corner,” said the assistant chief.
Less than a mile away, also in Queens, a 44-year-old man standing on a street corner was shot in the face, police said. He was hospitalized in critical condition.
A few blocks away, at 11:37 a.m., the last victim known to police, described as a 63-year-old man, was shot in the shoulder, police said. He was stabilized at a hospital, they said.
Four pans were found at that location, they said. Other scenes also featured multiple 9mm shell casings, they said.
A blurry security camera image of a suspect on a motorcycle was sent to “every cop on the street,” Kenny said.
NBC New York reported that the image was sent to officers as part of a system that will sound an alarm on their devices until they acknowledge seeing it.
At 1:10 p.m., about 10 blocks from the latest attack, the 25-year-old suspect was arrested by officers who recognized him from security footage, police said.
It was unclear what the suspect had been doing in the more than 90 minutes since the last shooting.
Caban said detectives are investigating the origin of the firearm and the possibility that it is a phantom weapon, a term that describes weapons that can be 3D printed from composite material and put into use without required serial numbers or routine background checks.
The biggest mystery seemed to be the reason.
“At this point, we don’t know the reason,” Kenny said. “It looks like it’s actually random if you look at the demographics and the pedigree of the victims. They’re all different at this point.”
The nonprofit Everytown, which urges evidence-based gun regulation, says random shootings are probably less common than previously thought: the attacker in nearly half of all mass shootings in United States is a partner, ex-partner or family member of one of the victims.
Everytown defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are killed. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings in the United States, defines a mass shooting as one in which four victims, not including the shooter, are injured or killed by gunshots.
Count the violence in New York on Saturday morning as a mass shooting. According to the archive, there have been more than 360 mass shootings under that definition since the beginning of the year.
Myles Miller, Jonathan Dienst, Courtney Brogle, Ava Kelley and Michelle Acevedo contributed.
