NYPD seek balaclava-wearing gunman who shot two homeless men, one fatally, in SoHo

NYC homeless advocates say latest violence underscores vulnerabilities facing thousands of unsheltered New Yorkers, with mayor’s policies ‘placing them in harm’s way’

New York City Police Department seeks help finding a suspect who shot two homeless men, one fatally, on 12 March 2022. (New York City Police Department)

New York City Police Department officials have announced a $10,000 reward for help finding a suspect who shot two homeless men, one fatally, in separate shootings that Mayor Eric Adams condemned as “clear and horrific intentional” acts against the city’s homeless population.

Police responded to a shooting at King and Varick streets near the upscale SoHo neighbourhood at 4.30am on 12 March to find a 38-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his arm.

NYPD Deputy Chief Hank Sautner said the victim, who was sleeping before he was attacked, screamed “what are you doing?” as the suspect fled the scene. The victim is in stable condition at a nearby hospital, according to officials.

Roughly a dozen blocks away less than two hours later, the same suspect fatally shot a man who was asleep in a sleeping bag, police said.

“The connectivity here is obvious that both gentlemen are homeless,” Mr Sautner said during a press briefing on Saturday.

The victims have not been publicly identified. No arrests have been made.

Surveillance footage of the attack “is chilling, to see a cold-blooded act of murder,” Mayor Adams said. “Two people shot while sleeping on the streets, not committing a crime.”

“The case is a clear and horrific intentional act of taking the life of someone that appears because he was homeless,” he said. “We need to find this person, and we need New Yorkers to help us.”

The attacks – which follow the new administration’s efforts to remove homeless people from the city’s subway system and expand capacity across the city’s mental health services – underscore the vulnerabilities facing thousands of unsheltered New Yorkers living on the city’s streets and outside of the city’s shelter system.

More than 45,000 people – including 14,600 children – were in city shelters on a given night in 2021, though city data does not include thousands of people who sleep on the streets and in the subways each night.

With persistent winter weather sending temperatures below freezing, the city’s Department of Homeless Services issued a “Code Blue” on Sunday to accommodate unsheltered people on the city’s streets.

Last year marked the deadliest year on record for the city’s homeless population, fuelled largely by a rise in lethal drug-related overdoses, according to a report from the city’s health and social services agencies. At least 640 unhoused people died in shelters, hospitals or the streets, the report found.

As The New York Times points out, a 32-year-old man was fatally stabbed while sleeping on a subway train and a 66-year-old homeless man died after he was set on fire while sleeping in a stairwell in the Lower East Side last November.

In December, a man was arrested for allegedly stomping a 75-year-old man sleeping outside a bank on the Upper West Side.

Last month, a homeless man was mugged and stabbed at a subway station in Queens.

Advocates for the city’s homeless population gathered on Sunday to mourn and condemn the latest attacks at a vigil on Saturday evening.

Jacquelyn Simone, policy director for the Coalition for the Homeless, asked “how many examples like this do we need to see before the city starts valuing the lives of homeless New Yorkers as much as the lives of those lucky enough to have homes?”

“Despite the headlines, homeless New Yorkers are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators,” she said in a statement. “Instead of feeding into the dangerous narrative of homelessness as a blight – a quality of life issue for housed New Yorkers – Mayor Adams needs to recognize that his policies are placing them in harm’s way.”

She called the shootings “an urgent reminder that many unsheltered New Yorkers choose to bed down in the subways because that is where they feel the most safe in the absence of housing and low-barrier shelters.”

The organisation has called on city and state officials to immediately open Safe Haven beds and other housing for unsheltered New Yorkers.

The latest violence is the “direct result of a growing reckless and hateful anti-homeless culture that has been allowed to exist by politicians [and] the meda,” according to a statement from VOCAL-NY homelessness union organiser Celina Trowell

“The answer is permanent, safe, humane housing and care,” she said in a statement.