This archive report was first published on 11 December 2019.
Jersey City Shooting Leaves Six Dead ¶
On Tuesday, a prolonged firefight in Jersey City, New Jersey, left six people dead, including one police officer. The Jersey City mayor, Steven Fulop, stated that surveillance footage indicated the two shooters had targeted a kosher supermarket, where most of the carnage unfolded.
Mayor Fulop wrote on Twitter that an 'extensive review' of the city's closed-circuit cameras made it clear that the shooters had targeted the kosher grocery location. He added that 'hate and anti-Semitism have never had a place' in Jersey City.
Investigations revealed that the suspect had published anti-Semitic and anti-police posts online, which investigators believe motivated the attack. However, the authorities have not identified the shooters, who were killed in the firefight.
One of the victims was Detective Joe Seals, a 15-year law enforcement veteran and father of five. He was killed while approaching the two suspects, a man and a woman, who were inside a U-Haul van at a cemetery near the kosher market.
Video surveillance footage shows the suspects shooting Detective Seals and then driving away and ending up in front of the kosher market, where they parked and entered the store, guns firing. For much of the next hour, residents nearby could hear rapid bursts of gunfire coming from the area around the market.
Initially, investigators believed that the market was a random choice by the shooters and that the episode was not a hate crime. However, by Tuesday night, Mayor Fulop stated that officials now believed that the shooters had targeted the location they attacked.
On Wednesday morning, detectives were at the Jersey City Kosher Supermarket, canvassing the crime scene as a number of uniformed police officers stood watch outside. Officials said that five people, including the two shooters, were killed in the battle at the market on Tuesday.
The authorities were alerted about a shooting at the market around 12:30 p.m., according to Jersey City's police chief, Michael Kelly. The officers who responded were met with 'high-powered rifle fire,' he said.
The market was part of a budding Jewish community in the Greenville neighborhood of Jersey City. The center of the chaotic scene, the Jersey City Kosher Supermarket, caters to a small but steadily growing community of about 100 Hasidic families who have moved to Jersey City in recent years from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
These families, many of whom belong to the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect, have created a budding community in Greenville, a residential area with a historically African-American population and dense blocks that include a Catholic school, a Pentecostal church, and a Dominican restaurant.
Detective Seals had been a police officer for 15 years, said Chief Kelly. He rose through the ranks of the Jersey City Police Department, coming to work in the city's busy South District. After being promoted to detective in 2017, he was most recently assigned to a citywide Cease Fire unit, which is tasked with reducing shootings and making gun arrests in Jersey City.
He lived in North Arlington, New Jersey, a suburb about eight miles northwest of Jersey City, with his wife and five children. Joe Buocolo, a retired lieutenant from Bergen County, New Jersey, who lives on the same block as the Seals family, said he was not surprised that Detective Seals confronted the shooters.
