Police Searching For Suspect Following Fatal Shooting On Upper East Side
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Police are still searching for the gunman after a shooting on the Upper East Side on Monday afternoon left one man dead. The incident followed nearly 30 shootings citywide over the weekend.
Mayor Bill de Blasio insists police and prosecutors have a handle on the city's gun violence, but critics on both sides of the political spectrum say clearly it's not enough, CBS2's Ali Bauman reported.
Exclusive surveillance video shows the shooting on the idyllic Manhattan block.
Police said the gunman got into the backseat of a parked car on East 95th Street between Park and Lexington avenues at around 2:30 p.m. One minute later, while another passenger goes to get something in the trunk, police said the gunman shot the victim in the car.
The other passenger then jumped behind the wheel and the car took off and hit a parked car several feet away.
The gunman took off running.
The victim was not immediately identified, but Bauman reported he is a man in his 20s and that he was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital, where we was pronounced dead.
"I heard someone scream for help. One of his friends in yellow run the ambulance asking for help, so when I came out he was on the floor already. They pulled him out the car and were trying to resuscitate him," witness Richie Martinez said.
Martinez is a doorman on the block.
"I've been working here 13 years, never seen any kind of violence like that over here," he said.
The incident follows a violent weekend in the Big Apple that saw 28 gun incidents with 31 victims. The same time last year there were four gun incidents with five victims.
"There's a tremendous coordination happening right this moment between courts, prosecutors, NYPD to finally be able to move things forward and get the small number of really bad actors out of circulation. That's going to change everything," de Blasio said.
In his proposed new budget, the mayor sought to deal with gun violence by establishing partnerships with communities. The NYPD force was kept at 35,000, no extra cops.
Dr. Robert Gonzalez is a professor of criminal justice at St. John's University and the former NYPD assistant commissioner for training.
"Until we can invest in bringing in new police officers to go out there on the street and combat the increase in crime here in New York City, all these other plans and ideas and projects to me are just lip service," Gonzalez said.
But community-based Cure Violence groups do not agree.
"I don't think that having more police is necessarily the answer," said Iesha Sekou of Street Corner Resources. "But I do think we need to look at how are guns coming into poor communities."
Sources told CBS2 police found a large amount of marijuana in the car involved in Monday's incident. It's unclear what lead up to the shooting.
