- NBC confirmed with the US military that the male shooter, David Anderson, had served in the US Army Reserve.
- The two killers were armed with a variety of weapons, including an AR-15-style rifle and a shotgun that they were wielding when they stormed into the store in an attack that left the scene littered with several hundred shell casings.
- A pipe bomb was also found in a stolen U-Haul van.
- Store employee Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, 49.a non-Jewish immigrant from Ecuador, was killed while helping a customer escape.
- Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop said Friday that he believes Anderson and Graham were actually planning to target a yeshiva next door to the supermarket that had 50 children inside at the time of the assault.
A survivor of the deadly shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey, said Friday that he had narrowly escaped death and that the shooters had clearly come into the store to kill people.
"The way they came in, they came to kill, to shoot," David Lax told CNN news.
The shooters killed three people Tuesday in the JC Kosher Supermarket before being killed by police. Authorities said the attackers were motivated by anti-Semitism.
Lax owns an appliance repair shop in the same neighborhood and had stopped in the supermarket for lunch. When the shooting started, he dove under the store’s refrigerated salad bar, until the male shooter moved past him. Lax then stood up and encountered the female attacker, who entered the store second.
"The second she starts pivoting herself, I just went right in and push back her arm and just run right out of the store," Lax said.
The woman, later identified as Francine Graham, fired at him as he fled, Lax said. Lax dashed across the street to safety in a dramatic escape that was captured on surveillance footage.
"I didn’t look right or left, I just ran for my life," he said.
In a separate interview Thursday with NBC news, Lax said the two shooters appeared well-prepared for the assault. NBC confirmed with the US military that the male shooter, David Anderson, had served in the US Army Reserve.
"The way they were carrying themselves, the way they were handling themselves, they were very professional," Lax said.
The entire ordeal for him lasted about 10 seconds, he said. After fleeing the store Lax found a child outside, whom he escorted farther from the store, then called the police.
"I’m not sure why, but I’m alive," he said.
The two killers were armed with a variety of weapons, including an AR-15-style rifle and a shotgun that they were wielding when they stormed into the store in an attack that left the scene littered with several hundred shell casings, broken glass and a community in mourning. A pipe bomb was also found in a stolen U-Haul van.
The victims killed in the store were: Mindel Ferencz, 32, who with her husband owned the grocery; 24-year-old Moshe Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was shopping there; and store employee Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, 49.
Rodriguez, a non-Jewish immigrant from Ecuador, was killed while helping a customer escape.
Before arriving at the supermarket, the shooters killed police officer Joseph Seals, who had confronted them in a nearby cemetery. Officials have not yet released details of the encounter.
Law enforcement officials said the shooters were motivated by anti-Jewish hatred.
Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop said Friday that he believes Anderson and Graham were actually planning to target a yeshiva next door to the supermarket that had 50 children inside at the time of the assault.
On Thursday New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said the attack was driven by hatred of Jews and law enforcement and is being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism.
Members of the area’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community gathered Wednesday night for funerals for Ferencz and Deutsch. Thousands of people followed Ferencz’s casket through the streets of Brooklyn, hugging and crying.
The bloodshed in the city of 270,000 people across the Hudson River from New York City spread fear through the nascent Jewish community of around 100 families, most of whom moved to New Jersey from Brooklyn in recent years.
FBI locates van thought linked to deadly New Jersey attack
[IsraelTimes] Vehicle, which suspects reportedly lived in, found in Orange, New Jersey, after police in nearby Ramapo, New York, alert public to searchFederal authorities have recovered a van that may be connected to the Jersey City shootings that killed four people and are now being investigated as domestic terrorism, the FBI said Saturday.
The white van recovered Saturday morning in Orange, New Jersey, about 11 miles (17 kilometers) northwest of Jersey City, is being examined for any evidence related to the attack, the FBI said in a news release.
A man and woman killed a police officer near a cemetery, three people in a kosher supermarket and then died in an hourslong gun battle with police Tuesday, authorities say. It was not clear how the van may be linked to the attack, and authorities did not release further details.
According to reports, attackers, David Anderson and Francine Graham may have lived in the van after being evicted from their Elizabeth, New Jersey, home.
Police in Ramapo, New York, close to New Jersey’s northern border, had earlier said that FBI officials had told them they were trying to locate a white van in connection with Tuesday’s events.
New Jersey’s attorney general said Thursday that the attackers were driven by hatred of Jews and law enforcement. The two were armed with a variety of weapons, including an AR-15-style rifle and a shotgun, and a pipe bomb was also found in a stolen U-Haul van — a vehicle different from the white van recovered Saturday.
Both Orange and Ramapo have large Jewish communities.
The attackers, Anderson, 47, and Graham, 50, had expressed interest in a fringe religious group called the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose members often rail against Jews and whites, but there was no evidence so far that they were members and they are believed to have acted alone, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said.
| An earlier Times of Israel article adds: |
Director of Public Safety James Shea called Seals “the ultimate detective or officer we would point to to tell young officers, ‘This is how you should behave.'” He said Friday that he doubted Seals would have been ambushed by the pair. Authorities haven’t disclosed why Seals was in the cemetery or details of the confrontation that led to his death.
Anderson fired away with the AR-15-style rifle as he entered the store, while Graham brought a 12-gauge shotgun into the shop. They also had handguns with a homemade silencer and a device to catch shell casings. In all, they had five guns — four recovered in the store, one in the van — in what Grewal called a “tremendous amount of firepower.”
Serial numbers from two of the weapons showed that Graham purchased them in Ohio in 2018, the attorney general said.
| And from the New York Times via Ace of Spades — have we got ourselves a Muslim? |
Mr. Anderson repeatedly played audio recordings of a man the neighbor believed to be Louis Farrakhan, and sounded like he himself was growing agitated. He shouted bible verses and then chanted out his interpretations of what they meant.
The neighbor said the most common theme was that Mr. Anderson's religion was the only true faith while others -- specifically Catholicism and Judaism -- were false.