Empire State Building shooting victim: police were ‘shooting randomly’

image credit: David Shankbone

Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

The tragic recent shooting in New York City has taken another strange turn with one of the nine innocent bystanders shot by officers of the New York Police Department alleging that the police were actually “shooting randomly” into the busy street.

The incident appeared at first to be another in a line of recent shootings until it emerged that the police were actually directly responsible for the vast majority of the violence, injuring nine people.

Thankfully, the police did not mortally wound any of the innocent bystanders, but they still unloaded a whopping 14 rounds between them before killing Jeffrey Johnson, the fired accessories designer who murdered his former boss Steve Ercolino.

According to New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, “it appears that all nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired by police.”

After the shooting first occurred on Friday, August 24, 2012, it was unclear if it was Johnson or the officers who were responsible for the nine bystanders left bleeding on the sidewalk but based on the ballistic and other evidence, it appears that Kelly is now quite certain who fired the rounds.

Now one of the wounded pedestrians, named Robert Asika, has accused the police of “shooting randomly” into the street, which is a quite serious allegation indeed.

Asika was unlucky enough to be shot in the elbow by one of the police officers from a mere eight feet away while he was selling tickets for tour buses and the Empire State Building’s observation deck.

He started only a week ago after being unemployed for more than a year and did not hesitate to criticize how the police handled the incident, saying, “If you’re gonna aim try and aim perfectly. If you wanna aim at the target, you got to know what you’re doing because it’s the street. I could have been dead right now. I could have been dead.”

“I was just standing there and I saw people running. I didn’t want to run because I wanted to know why people were running so I turned around and I saw this guy,” Asika continued, referring to Johnson.

“He was suited up, he had like a tie and a briefcase. If you see him, you’d probably think he was like a doctor, or maybe a lawyer, a business guy,” said Asika. “He just looked like a normal guy.”

Asika witnessed this soon after Johnson murdered 41-year-old Ercolino with whom he “had a history of workplace squabbles” before being fired, at one point they even “grappled physically in an elevator.”

According to police, three people were hit by whole bullets while the rest of the nine victims were grazed by what Kelly called “fragments of some sort.”

Officer Craig Matthews fired seven of the bullets while Officer Robert Sinishtaj fired nine and interestingly enough, both officers had never discharged their weapon on patrol before.

There does not seem to be any reports of the two officers, both 15-year veterans of the NYPD, being suspended or having any action taken against them as of yet.

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This article first appeared at End the Lie.