Michael Bloomberg
By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Gun prohibitionists who jumped almost immediately to exploit the “mass shooting” near New York City’s Empire State Building were left suddenly in search of a statement, and the news media quickly moved the story off of Page One, when it was confirmed all the wounded gunshot victims had been hit by police bullets.
The gunfire erupted after Jeffrey Johnson brutally gunned down a former employer on the sidewalk, shooting him once in the head and four subsequent times in the torso after he was down. Johnson, armed with an old Star .45-caliber semi-auto pistol, walked down the street but was stopped a short distance away by New York patrolmen Robert Sinishtaj and Craig Matthews.
As the two officers approached, with a video surveillance camera capturing the entire 13-second incident, Johnson drew his pistol from a case and aimed it at them. Matthews and Sinishtaj quickly moved apart and drew their guns, opening fire. Sixteen rounds were fired, nine by Sinishtaj and the other seven by Matthews. Seven rounds hit Johnson including three that passed through him.
Johnson died almost immediately and in the melee, several people were hit, either by bullets or bullet fragments, all from the officers’ guns.
In the aftermath, anti-gun Mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived at the crime scene and answered questions, while anti-gunners tried to exploit the tragedy even before the bodies had been removed.
Toning the story down began almost immediately after Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly acknowledged for the first time that at least “some” of the victims had been hit by police bullets. When the admission came more than a day later that all of the bystanders had been hit by those rounds, and that Johnson hadn’t fired his gun in the confrontation, the story lost all traction.
Johnson’s victim, 41-year-old Steven Ercolino, had been involved in a long-running feud with the gunman. Johnson had been laid off from the designer company they worked at in 2011, and apparently had not found another job in the interim. He also reportedly had not done well in a silk screening enterprise he tried to operate, and he was also reportedly about to be evicted.
The Violence Policy Center tried to capitalize on the use of a semiautomatic pistol, but the aging Star, which Johnson had purchased legally two decades ago in Florida, has a seven-round magazine, and is no longer in production. There are no known suppliers of extended capacity magazines for that gun.
Questions were raised that Johnson may have committed “suicide-by-cop,” because he did not actually fire at either officer, who both fired at him multiple times. All three were armed with semi-autos, but when investigators checked, there were two rounds left in Johnson’s pistol. He had fired five shots into Ercolino, and although he had a spare magazine in his briefcase, he didn’t reload.
Even after it was revealed that bystanders were wounded by police, the VPC still persisted in trying to demonize Johnson’s gun because it was a semi-auto.
