A mass shooting at a Crown Heights hookah lounge early Sunday left three people dead and nine others wounded, according to the NYPD.
Police said several gunmen fired off rounds at the Taste of the City Lounge at Franklin Avenue and Carroll Street around 3:30 a.m. Officers recovered 42 shell casings from the scene, fired by 9 millimeter and 40 caliber guns, according to the NYPD.
The shooters have not yet been identified, but NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said police believe there were as many as four people who fired shots.
“The shooting preliminarily appears to be gang related,” Tisch said. “Approximately 60 percent of our shootings in New York City are gang related.”
The NYPD reported the people who died in the shooting were all men, and were 19, 27 and 35 years old. The nine other people who were wounded were taken to local hospitals with non-life threatening injuries, according to Tisch.
Tisch said the people shot ranged in age from 19 to 61 years, and three were women.
James Jones, who lives across the street from the hookah lounge, said he left the bar shortly before the shooting and returned after the attack.
“It was a bloodbath,” said Jones, 47. “There was blood all over the place, bullet shells all over the place. Two people were laying there dead. One girl was shot in her face. Five or six people outside were shot.”
“This is not Brooklyn. This was like a warzone,” he said.
Another shooting injured at least one person in November at the same intersection.
“Stuff happened at this place before, it’s not surprising but still surprising at the same time,” said Aykel Lewis, who lives in the area. “Usually when shootings do happen, a lot of innocent people are the ones that get hurt, sadly. I don’t even know how the guns even got in there in the first place. You usually want to have security in these kinds of places that stay open kind of late.”
During a news conference at City Hall, Mayor Eric Adams asked the public to help find the shooters.
“If you were inside the club, if you heard individuals talking about the shooting, if you witnessed someone fleeing the location, every piece of information would allow us to put the puzzle together to solve this crime,” Adams said. “Gun violence of this magnitude really scars a community and a city.”
During a separate news conference on Sunday morning, NYPD officials pointed to data showing a drop in gun violence citywide this year.
“We have the lowest number of shooting incidents and shooting victims seven months into the year that we’ve seen on record in the city of New York,” said Tisch.. “Something like this is, of course thank God, an anomaly. It’s a terrible thing that happened this morning but we’re going to investigate and get to the bottom of what went down.”
NYPD data shows shootings are down this year. Police data shows 489 people were shot from January through July, the lowest during the first seven months of a calendar year in the city since 2017.
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