Jennifer Smith, Daily Mail, December 11, 2019

The moment the two Jersey City shooters got out of their U-Haul and approached a kosher supermarket with their rifles drawn before killing three people inside has been revealed in chilling surveillance footage.

Francine Graham, 50, and David Anderson, 47, drove up to JC Kosher Supermarket on Tuesday afternoon in a U-Haul which they calmly parked.

They were then filmed moving towards the store with guns drawn as terrified pedestrians run for their lives.

One man was able to escape the store and came hurtling out of it as they made their way inside but Leah Mindel Ferencz, 33, Moshe Hirsch Deutsch, 24, and Miguel Douglas, 49, were all shot dead before police arrived.

Once officers did arrive, the two shooters came under gunfire. A two-hour stand-off ensued before they were eventually killed.

Graham and Anderson had already killed Detective Joseph Seals in a cemetery a mile away after he reportedly approached them to ask questions about the murder of 34-year-old Uber driver Michael Rumberger whose body was found in his the trunk of a car on Saturday.

Police sources say Anderson had made anti-Semitic posts online and that he was once a Black Hebrew Israelite, but what specifically drove them to carry out the killings remains unknown. He had reportedly been living in a van and selling snack food and clothing for a living.

Graham was a former home health aide who rented the U-Haul used in the attack, which was never returned and reported as stolen, sources say.

FBI and ATF agents have now extended their investigation to northern Ohio, where Anderson purchased four rifles several years ago. One of the four rifles was recovered at the scene of the attack, and investigators are seeking the other three.

The New Jersey Attorney General and other officials were hesitant to label the attack a hate crime, but Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop said on Wednesday it was ‘impossible’ to draw any other conclusion and that the community had to ‘aggressively’ call out anti-Semitism.

He also said that Graham and Anderson were ‘familiar’ with the community having both lived in it, and that they knew exactly where to target Jews.

‘I am Jewish. I am the grandson of a holocaust survivor. We need to be aggressive in calling it out for what it is.

‘I know people should say we should reviews things and take our time, but when you look at the facts it’s difficult to say anything other than this was an attack on the Jewish community,’ the mayor said.

Neighbors of Graham say she met him after stopping her job as a home health aide when she became injured.

They said she became a ‘dark person’ after meeting Anderson and that he coerced her into joining a militant religion.

The neighbor, who did not want to be named, told NBC he heard her chanting a word that translated to ‘evil’ from her home before she moved out last year.

The woman’s brothers and sisters have also revealed that she and Anderson dated at one time. Anderson has prior arrests for gun offenses.

On Wednesday, police officials abhorred the shooters and said they demonstrated ‘pure evil’.

They also revealed that in the wake of the attack, cruel opportunists with no connection to any of the victims had set up bogus GoFundMe accounts to profit from the tragedy.

The cops urged anyone who had given any money to any of the accounts to contact the FBI.

Attack began with shooting of cop who was investigating livery cab murder

The chaos began shortly before 12.30pm, when Detective Seals, 39, was shot dead by the two suspects at the Bay View Cemetery, which is a Protestant Christian burial ground.

Seals, a married father of five and member of the CeaseFire Unit dedicated to de-escalating gun violence, was investigating the death of Michael Rumberger, 34.

He was found dead on Saturday in the trunk of a car, having been beaten to death.

Sources say that Seals spotted a stolen U-Haul van that police suspected was linked to Rumberger’s murder, and approached the vehicle near the cemetery.

As Seals approached, a suspect got out of the van to shoot the officer before speeding off.

The suspects apparently drove in the stolen U-Haul directly to the JC Kosher Supermarket, about a mile away.

Shots were reported in the area at around 12.30pm, as the two suspects, clad in all-black and armed with assault rifles, stormed the store.

Seals was a member of the CeaseFire unit, which often tries to intervene in gang conflicts to prevent retaliatory killings after drug murders.

Officials say that Seals was responsible for getting dozens of illegal firearms off the streets.

However, Chief Kelly declined to specify exactly what kind of investigation Seals was pursuing at the time he confronted the two suspects.

Kelly said that Seals had joined the Jersey City police department in 2006, and praised him as dedicated detective who was well-liked on the force.

‘Joe was somebody who was involved in city,’ said Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop at a press conference.

‘Officers in other precincts knew who he was because he was a good cop.’

The bullets started flying early in the afternoon in the city of about 270,000 people, situated across the Hudson River from the Statue of Liberty.

The shooting spread fear through the neighborhood, and the nearby Sacred Heart School was put on lockdown as a precaution.

Witness Brian Clark told CBS2: ‘I got caught in a one way street with a bunch of cars and I was wondering why nobody was moving. And all of a sudden I heard it. All the shots started. Shots started ringing out.

‘When I heard it, I see people running. I got out of the car and I see cops ducked down, and cops getting out of the way.

‘And I’m wondering why, what the hell? So I get out of my car and I see it, and I heard it – pow pow pow pow pow – then I realized I was in a shootout. I never heard that many shots in my life. It was like I was in a war zone.’

Andy Patel, works at a liquor store about three blocks away from the site of the shooting, told the Associated Press there had been consistent gunfire for at least an hour.

‘I can hear the gunshots. It’s like firecrackers going off,’ Patel said. ‘They were shooting like crazy about an hour ago. Then it stopped for like 20 or 30 minutes. The cops were clearing everyone off the streets.’

The standoff sparked a massive multi-agency response, and the scene was flooded with heavily armed NYPD emergency services unit officers, FBI agents,Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents, and counter-terrorism task force officers.

Police blocked off the area while dozens of bystanders stood around the perimeter and filmed the action on their cellphones.