Canadian wounded in U.S. hospital rampage
St. Catharines man shot multiple times by doctor is completing medical residency in New York
A Canadian shot at a New York hospital was completing his residency there, his father says.
Justin Timperio, 29, of St. Catharines, was one of six people wounded during a shooting at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center on Friday. He is being treated at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital and is in stable condition in the surgical intensive care unit.
“The most damaging was straight to the liver,” said his father, Dr. Luciano Timperio, a dental surgeon in St. Catharines. “He had several in his intestines, one in his stomach, and one grazed his lungs as well. He was basically sprayed with bullets.”
Timperio said his son’s condition has stabilized enough that he can receive an operation on Monday. The younger Timperio is heavily sedated and can’t speak because of a tube in his throat to aid his breathing.
The barrage of gunfire claimed the life of one doctor before the shooter killed himself.
Timperio says his son was doing his residency in New York because he hadn’t got into an Ontario medical school or residency program in the province.
He said the provincial system highlights a lack of opportunity in Canada for young, aspiring doctors.
“If we could somehow fix the problem of getting our own homegrown kids to go to medical school in Ontario, this wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
After graduating from Brock University with a degree in biochemistry, Justin Timperio went to American University of the Caribbean for his medical degree before beginning his residency at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center.
His father believes his son couldn’t get into an Ontario school “because of so few spots.” “He graduated with a 90-per-cent average,” he said.
The issue is twofold, Timperio said. Aside from a lack of space in medical schools, there are also few spots available in residency programs in Ontario.
The Star reported last month that Ontario cut 25 residency posts for the 2016-17 training year. The provincial health ministry said the number of doctors in Ontario is projected to grow faster than the population, resulting in an average net increase of 650 physicians each year until 2025, even with reductions to the number of residencies.
This year, the number of unmatched students hit a record high of 68. Thirty-five of them were from Ontario, according to the Canadian Resident Matching Service, which runs the application process and the algorithm used to assign graduates to programs. Competition to get into medical school and subsequent residency programs is fierce.
Timperio said his son started working at Bronx-Lebanon about three years ago, for the clinical component of his medical training. He was then accepted to the hospital’s family resi- dency medical program, where he has worked for the past year.
“He’s a great family resident,” he said. “He’s so helpful and young. We need him here (in Canada).”
After the shooting on Friday, the assailant, identified as Dr. Henry Bello by New York police, fatally shot himself. Bello, a family doctor, was a former employee at the hospital.
A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that Bello arrived at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital with an assault rifle hidden under his lab coat and asked for a specific doctor who he blamed for forcing him to resign. The physician wasn’t there at the time.
Authorities said Bello went to the 16th and 17th floors and started shooting anyway, killing Dr. Tracy Sin-Yee Tam, also a family doctor.
“The individual was initially brought on as a house physician in August of 2014,” said a hospital spokesperson, Errol Schneer. “He subsequently resigned in lieu of termination in February of 2015.”
Bello resigned because of his “inability to meet the performance standards and policies of the hospital,” Schneer added.
Before the shooting, Bello sent an email to the New York Daily News, blaming colleagues he said forced him to resign two years earlier.
“This hospital terminated my road to a licensure to practise medicine,” the email said.
His former co-workers described a man who was aggressive, loud and threatening. Bello had warned his former colleagues when he was forced out in 2015 that he would return some day to kill them.
Of the six who were injured, the latest information from the hospital stated one remained in critical condition.