AFP, posted Monday, March 14, 2022 at 3:52 pm.
On Monday, police in New York and Washington were looking for a man suspected of shooting at homeless people, two of whom were killed in their sleep.
“A ruthless killer is on the loose, but we are going to arrest him and put him in jail,” said the mayors of two Democratic metropolitan areas, calling on the homeless to join shelters in anticipation of his arrest.
Our population is “shocked by these horrific crimes committed by a man who targets the most vulnerable of our residents,” added New York City Council members Eric Adams and Washington DC Muriel Bowser in a joint press release.
Law enforcement has released CCTV footage of a bearded man with a shaved head dressed in black and is offering a several thousand dollar reward for any information that could identify him.
He is responsible, they say, for five attacks carried out “with the same method” against men who were sleeping on the street.
The first two took place in the middle of the night, March 3 and 8, in the northeast of the American capital. The victims who were shot survived.
On Wednesday, September 9, emergency services intervened, still in Washington, because a homeless man’s tent caught fire. Inside, they found the body of a deceased man who had been shot multiple times.
According to investigators, the killer then went to New York, about 400 km to the north. On the night from Friday to Saturday, he made two new attacks.
A 38-year-old man was found injured but alive early in the morning in the south of New York’s Manhattan Island.
At the end of the day in the same area, police found another dead man with head and neck injuries. According to CCTV footage, the suspect shot him around 6:00 am while he was sleeping, shortly after the first incident.
The footage, broadcast by local channels, shows a man dressed in black with a hooded head and blue-gloved hands. He circles the man wrapped in the sleeping bag, giving him light kicks to see if he reacts, looking around before firing.