(NEW YORK) — The New York Police Department is searching for the woman who brazenly shot and killed another woman on a crowded city street in Brooklyn.
Surveillance video of the incident released by police shows a woman in black tights and a black long-sleeve shirt casually approach another woman chatting with a group of people. The suspect pulls a gun out from behind her back and shoots the unsuspecting woman, with her back turned, in the head at point-blank range.
Police said the suspect then shot the woman again several times after she fell to the ground from the first shot. The victim, identified as 42-year-old Delia Johnson, suffered gunshot wounds to the head and legs, police said.
Johnson was taken to Interfaith Medical Center where she was pronounced dead.
The shooting, which took place in the borough’s Prospect Heights neighborhood at 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, caused the group of people to scatter.
The suspect immediately got into a white vehicle and sped away from the scene.
Police have not released a possible motive for the shooting.
Crime has been on the rise in New York City during the pandemic. There’s been a 35.4% increase in murders in the last two years, according to NYPD data, though murders are down 2.4% in 2021 year-to-date compared to last year.
Shooting incidents in particular have skyrocketed, data shows. There’s been a 15.8% increase from 2020 to 2021, year-to-date, data shows, and a 100% increase over the past two years.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a briefing Thursday on July’s crime stats that he believed the police are gaining the upper hand on crime after a rough 2020.
“We saw a perfect storm of problems, challenges, crises all hitting together in 2020 like nothing we have ever seen in our lives,” de Blasio said Thursday. “But we are fighting back, we are coming back strong.”
“No one is diminishing the challenges,” he added. “We have real work to do, real problems to solve.”
Anyone with information on the shooting can call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS.
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