Shot MD’s dad blames medical education system
A Canadian shot at a New York hospital was completing his residency there due to a shortage of space in Canada, his father says.
Justin Timperio, 29, a St. Catharines medical resident at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center, was one of six people wounded during a brazen shooting at the hospital Friday.
“The most damaging was straight to the liver,” said 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.”
The barrage of gunfire claimed the life of one doctor before the shooter killed himself.
His son is being treated at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital in the surgical intensive care unit and is in stable condition, Timperio said.
Timperio doesn’t blame the attacker, but the 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.
His son “couldn’t get into an Ontario school because of so few spots. He graduated with a 90 per cent average.”
Justin, a graduate of Brock University, has been a resident at
the Bronx-area hospital for a full year and was a medical student there for two, said Timperio.
“I imagine he will return to his residency program once he’s fit,” he said, adding that people love him at the hospital.
“He’s a great family resident,” he said.
“He’s so helpful and young. We need him here (in Canada).”
After the spate of grisly violence, the assailant, identified as Dr. Henry Bello by New York police, turned the barrel of an assault-style rifle and 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 BronxLebanon Hospital on Friday with a rifle hidden under his lab coat and asked for a specific doctor whom 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.
Hospital officials said that Tam, 32, normally worked in one of the hospital’s satellite clinics and was covering a shift in the main hospital as a favour to someone else.
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 to the newspaper said.
“First, I was told it was because I always kept to myself. Then it was because of an altercation with a nurse.”
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.
“All the time he was a problem,” said Dr. David Lazala, who trained Bello.
When Bello was forced out in 2015, he sent Lazala an email blaming him for the dismissal.
Of the six who were injured, one remained in critical condition Saturday and the rest were stable, hospital officials said Saturday.
Detectives searched the Bronx home where Bello was most recently living and found the box where the gun came from.
Investigators were checking serial numbers and trying to determine where it was purchased.