A scooter-riding gunman killed an 87-year-old man and wounded three other people in a string of random shootings that stretched across two New York City boroughs. A 25-year-old man was taken into custody, said Assistant Police Chief Joseph Kenny, the Associated Press reports. A 9 mm handgun with an extended magazine and a scooter were recovered. Police pulled an image of the gunman from video and sent it to phones of officers, some of whom spotted the suspect two hours after the first shooting. “We don’t know the motive. It seems his acts were random,” Kenny said. The NYPD said there were five shootings during the spree by someone on a scooter, one in Brooklyn and four in Queens.
The shootings began around 11:10 a.m. when someone on a scooter shot a 21-year-old man in the shoulder in Brooklyn. Seventeen minutes later, a 87-year-old man was shot multiple times in the Richmond Hill area of Queens. He died at a hospital. About one minute later, a 63-year-old man was shot in the torso. He was in stable condition at a hospital. Killings in the nation’s most populous city have risen in recent years to about where they were a decade ago — well below an early-1990s peak. The number of people wounded by gunfire surged in New York City during the pandemic and remains stubbornly high. Mayor Eric Adams, a former New York City police captain, has stressed the importance of getting guns off the streets.