As the two officers confronted a gunman in front of the Empire State Building on a busy Friday morning, they had to make a snap decision: Do they open fire in the middle of Midtown?
From a distance of less than 10 feet, the officers, Craig Matthews and Robert Sinishtaj, answered in unison; one shot nine times and the other seven.
Investigators believe at least 7 of those 16 bullets struck the gunman, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. But the officers also struck some, if not all, of the nine bystanders who were wounded.
This was the second time in two weeks that the police were involved in a fatal shooting in Midtown; on Aug. 11, two officers fired 12 shots at a knife-wielding man after he escaped arrest in Times Square.
The Patrol Guide prohibits officers from firing their weapons if, “in their professional judgment, doing so will unnecessarily endanger innocent persons.”
Mr. Browne said that in Friday’s shooting, the two officers had taken account of their surroundings before firing, as they are trained to do. Video surveillance footage, Mr. Browne said, shows that most of the wounded bystanders were closer to the Empire State Building, while the shooter was near the curb.
One of those wounded said he was standing behind the gunman when the police opened fire.
“One of the cops shot me in my arm,” a 23-year-old man, Robert Asika, said outside Bellevue Hospital Center. He said that the gunman was moving toward him, and suggested that the officers “shot me probably trying to shoot him.”
Mr. Asika said he could not “really get mad at the cops.”
“I get they were doing their job, but they have to be a little more careful when they are aiming the gun at the suspect and not hit the innocent victims,” he said. Video released by the Police Department shows no one close to the gunman.
The two officers were from the South Bronx, working a tour as part of the Police Department’s counterterrorism deployment at high-profile locations. The duty normally entails helping tourists and the like, and as New Yorkers trickled into work shortly after 9 a.m., this day seemed no different. In the crowd that streamed past was a man dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a black bag, going by the officers calmly and unhurriedly, Mr. Browne said.
“He wouldn’t have drawn anyone’s particular attention,” Mr. Browne said, if not for a construction worker who “pointed him out to these officers.” The worker said that the man had just shot someone around the corner.
The officers approached the gunman, whom the police identified as Jeffrey T. Johnson, and the situation quickly escalated.
Surveillance video shows Mr. Johnson walking north on Fifth Avenue, between the street and some curbside planters. The two officers gave chase, just as a family of four walked past Mr. Johnson in the other direction. The video showed him reaching into a bag, pulling out a .45-caliber pistol and pointing it at the officers.
The shooting was over in a matter of seconds.
A number of the bystanders may have been wounded by bullet fragments and ricochets after bullets struck nearby flowerpots, Mr. Browne said, suggesting that the bystanders were not in the path of the bullets when the officers fired.
Many of the wounds to bystanders were “mostly in the lower extremity areas, such as legs and ankles, which would be consistent with some of the ricochet fragmented ballistics we found,” Mr. Browne said.
He said there was no ballistic evidence that the gunman fired any rounds as the police confronted him, though the police were still investigating a report by one witness who said the gunman did fire at the police.
The officers have been removed from patrol duty — standard practice when one discharges a weapon, the police said.
Mr. Browne said officers were trained to take cover, if possible, when facing a gunman, but there was no opportunity to do so here.
“They were approaching this man with a gun, and he turns on them, and he is eight feet away, pointing a gun right at them,” he said.
It is not unheard-of for bystanders to be hit in police shootouts. A year ago, a woman sitting on her stoop was killed in a shootout in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in which the police fired 73 shots at a gunman who had just fatally shot another man. The police have since conceded that a police bullet might have killed the woman but have said the ballistics leave some uncertainty.
And a decision by the state’s highest court in 2010 found that the police involved in a 2005 shooting in Harlem could not be found negligent for wounding two bystanders. The majority decision noted that the officers had not seen any of the bystanders in the area at the time of the shooting. However, a dissenting opinion in the case pointed out that some of the officers had given testimony suggesting that they had not looked.
Officer Matthews is well-known in the Police Department because he had filed a federal lawsuit alleging that in the 42nd Precinct, there was a strict quota system for arrests, summonses and street stops.
