New York police are appealing for witnesses to locate a suspect after two homeless people sleeping rough were shot and killed on Saturday morning, one of whom died, a ‘horrendous’ crime for the Mayor Eric Adams.
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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, shortly before 5:00 p.m. Saturday, in the same neighborhood, the police found another man dead in his sleeping bag, injured in the head and neck. According to CCTV 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 on Saturday evening. “Two people were shot because they were sleeping on the street. They were not committing a crime, they were sleeping on the street,” he said.
Warning issued to the homeless
Eric Adams and police have called on the tens of thousands of homeless New Yorkers to avoid sleeping rough and join emergency shelters in 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 on 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 seems that he is about a homeless person.
A controversy for the mayor of the city
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 dislodge those who settle in the gigantic underground metro system, in particular winter when temperatures frequently drop below 0 degrees Celsius.
Eric Adams was responding to a series of headline-grabbing crimes, including the death of a woman pushed onto the subway tracks by a mentally ill homeless man.
His project had been poorly received by certain associations, including the Coalition for the Homeless, which had replied that “people settle in the metro because they have no better place to go”.
“Despite the headlines, homeless people in New York are far more likely to be victims of crimes than their perpetrators,” the association added on Sunday, calling on the mayor “to recognize that his policies put them at risk. danger “.
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