Manhattan shooting: Workers use sofas, desks to block office doors as shooter goes on rampage
The incident took place around 6 pm, (local time) at a skyscraper located at 345 Park Avenue in a crowded area of Midtown Manhattan.
New Delhi: A 27-year-old man went on a shooting rampage in New York's Midtown Manhattan, killing four people, including a police officer on Monday. The suspected gunman, identified as Shane Tamura of Las Vegas, shot himself dead, reports said.
The incident took place around 6 pm, (local time) at a skyscraper located at 345 Park Avenue in a crowded area of Midtown Manhattan. The building houses some of the country's top corporate firms, including hedge fund giant Blackstone, Colgate-Palmolive and auditor KPMG, along with National Football League headquarters.
According to US media reports, the shooter, carrying an AR-style rifle had a gunfight with a New York Police Department officer in the lobby of the building before going up to the 33rd floor. Several people who were present at the building at the time of incident shared horrifying photos on social media, showing employees working inside 345 Park Avenue blocking their office doors with furniture.
In one of the pictures, employees at Blackstone in a business attire can be seen putting sofas and desks near their office door in an attempt to block it. "This is how the employees in the Blackstone building barricaded themselves inside their offices while the shooter was active," the social media user who posted the picture wrote on X.
According to eyewitnesses, the gunman went floor to floor when employees were leaving for the day. Visuals from the scene show people coming out of their offices out of panic as cops move towards the building. An eyewitness said that she heard multiple gunshots while she was watching a presentation along with her colleagues. Upon hearing the shots, she and others ran into a conference room and locked the door and barricaded tables against it. Another witness living near the corporate office building recounted the scenes and said it reminded her of 9/11 terror attack in which nearly 3,000 people had died. "Some people came running back inside saying people were shouting on the street that there was an active shooter. I lived through 9/11, and all the sights/sounds reminded me of that day. I'm ok now," Kathleen Benanti told NBC News.
New York's police said that the scene had been "contained and the lone shooter is dead". The cop killed in the shooting was an immigrant from Bangladesh and has been identified as Didarul Islam (36).