Metro

Shots fired in apparent murder-suicide at NY hospital

An armed man walked into Westchester Medical Center on Wednesday morning and fatally shot a female patient in her bed before turning the gun on himself, officials said.

“There appears to be some type of family relationship between the two victims and a murder-suicide-type situation,” Westchester County Public Safety Commissioner Tom Gleason told reporters.

Armed hospital security guards responded immediately to the shooting at the sprawling facility in Valhalla. Three police officers arrived within two minutes of the 9:39 a.m. shooting, he added.

The man was found on the floor along with a .38-caliber revolver registered to him, he said. It was unknown how many shots were fired. No one else was in the room at the time of the shooting.

Their names have not been released pending family notification. It was unclear why the woman was hospitalized.





Officials did not comment about where in their bodies they were shot and whether a note was left behind.

“There is no ongoing threat to anyone at the hospital, or any other medical institution,” police said in a statement earlier. “The Administration is in constant contact with law enforcement.”

Officials said armed security guards are stationed at every entrance to the building, though no comprehensive searches are conducted of visitors.

An investigation will be conducted into how the man entered with the handgun, they said.

Jatziri Escobar, a patient who showed up shortly after 9 a.m., said he was on the first floor when staff members ran through the building to alert people about the shooting.

“I was kinda scared, but one of the officers told me to relax and all would be OK,” Escobar, 22, of Elmsford, told the Journal News/lohud.com.





Escobar said another patient and nurses mentioned a man who shot his wife.

“They said he shot his wife and held her hostage, and I was just told he shot himself because he had no way out,” Escobar said.

Dr. Srihari Naidu, a cardiologist, told the Associated Press that he was at his office in a nearby building when he got an “active shooter alert,” followed by a lockdown notification.

The building where the shooting happened is “very well-guarded,” he said, and many areas cannot be accessed without badges.

Joel Brown said he was working at the hospital when he found out about the shooting.

“I look outside the window of the burns unit and I saw a whole lot of nurses and doctors running outside on their cellphones,” he told WNBC.





Hospital executive vice president Kara Bennorth said “safety and security is paramount” at the facility, where a silver alert sounded during the emergency.

She said the hospital conducts mandatory monthly and annual active-shooter training.

“I think today they responded appropriately to the incident,” she said about the security personnel.

The hospital, about 35 miles north of Manhattan, is the region’s Level 1 Trauma Center and houses the only burns unit between New York City and Canada. The hospital serves more than 3.5 million people in the Hudson Valley.

In 2004, former President Bill Clinton went there with chest pains and shortness of breath. A test revealed narrowing of several heart vessels and he underwent a quadruple bypass later at a Manhattan hospital.

The shooting marks the second at an area hospital in a little over a year.





On June 30, 2017, Henry Bello, 45, an unhinged former Bronx-Lebanon Hospital doctor, used an AR-15 assault rifle to shoot seven people before killing himself at the hospital.

He killed a doctor and left six other people injured in his revenge-fueled rampage, which he unleashed amid accusations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct made against him by a female employee.

Hospitals have been beefing up security in the wake of last year’s shooting.

Two Long Island hospitals recently started arming their security guards. Another requires visitors to show ID and obtain a hospital-issued guest pass before passing through security.





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