The couple who burst into a kosher market
in Jersey City with assault weapons appear to have acted alone, even though
they had expressed interest in a fringe religious group that often disparages
whites and Jews, New Jersey officials said. Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said
the attack was driven by hatred of Jews and law enforcement and is being
investigated as an act of domestic terrorism.
The two killers were armed with a variety
of weapons, including an AR-15-style rifle and a shotgun that they were
wielding when they stormed into the store in an attack that left the scene
littered with several hundred shell casings, broken glass and a community in
mourning. A pipebomb was also found in a stolen U-Haul van.
"The outcome would have been far, far
worse" if not for the Jersey City Police, Mr Grewal said Thursday.
Authorities noted that a Jewish school is next to the market, and a Catholic
school is across the street.
The attackers killed three people in the
store, in addition to a police officer at a cemetery a small distance away,
before dying in an hours-long gun battle with police Tuesday afternoon,
authorities said.
"The evidence points toward acts of
hate," the attorney general said. "I can confirm that we're
investigating this matter as potential acts of domestic terrorism fueled both
by anti-Semitism and anti-law enforcement beliefs."
He said social media posts, witness
interviews and other evidence reflected the couple's hatred of Jews and police.
Mr Grewal noted that after killing three people in the store, the couple
concentrated their fire on police and did not shoot at others who happened to
be on the streets.
Mr Grewal said the attackers, David
Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50, had expressed interest in a fringe
religious group called the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose members often rail
against Jews and whites. But he said there was no evidence so far that they
were members, and added that the two were believed to have acted alone. The
pair brought their cache of weapons in a U-Haul van they drove from Bay View
Cemetery, where they shot and killed Jersey City Detective Joseph Seals,
according to the attorney general.
The Tunnel Towers organisation, formed
after September 11 to support police officers killed in the line of duty, said
Friday it would pay the mortgage of Mr Seals, who left behind a wife and five
children. Director of Public Safety James Shea called Seals "the ultimate
detective or officer we would point to to tell young officers, 'This is how you
should behave'". He said Friday that he doubted Mr Seals would have been
ambushed by the pair. Authorities haven't disclosed why Mr Seals was in the
cemetery or details of the confrontation that led to his death.
Anderson fired away with the AR-15-style
rifle as he entered the store, while Graham brought a 12-gauge shotgun into the
shop. They also had handguns with a homemade silencer and a device to catch
shell casings. In all, they had five guns – four recovered in the store, one in
the van – in what Mr Grewal called a "tremendous amount of
firepower".
Serial numbers from two of the weapons
showed that Graham purchased them in Ohio in 2018, the attorney general said.
The victims killed in the store were:
Mindel Ferencz, 31, who with her husband owned the grocery; 24-year-old Moshe
Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was shopping there; and store
employee Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, 49. A fourth person in the store was shot
and wounded but managed to escape, authorities said.
Members of New York's ultra-Orthodox Jewish
community gathered Wednesday night for funerals for Ms Ferencz and Mr Deutsch.
Thousands of people, mostly men, followed Ms Ferencz's casket through the
streets of Brooklyn, hugging and crying. The bloodshed in the city of 270,000
people across the Hudson River from New York City spread fear through the
Jewish community and weighed heavily on the minds of more than 300 people who
attended a vigil Wednesday night at a synagogue near where the shootings took
place.
In the deadliest attack on Jews in US
history, 11 people were killed in an October 2018 shooting at a synagogue in
Pittsburgh. Last April, a gunman opened fire at a synagogue near San Diego,
killing a woman and wounding a rabbi and two others.
Sumber:
9news.com - 14 Disember 2019
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