Doctor in NY attack was seeking revenge

He ranted against colleagues in email sent before shooting

NEW YORK — A doctor angry that his career was derailed at a New York City hospital toted an assault rifle past security in search of a colleague he was going to hold responsible. When that person wasn’t there, he opened fire anyway, killing a doctor who was only there covering a shift as a favor, authorities said Saturday.

The new details of Dr. Henry Bello’s rampage emerged along with an email rant against colleagues he blamed for forcing him to resign from Bronx Lebanon Hospital amid sexual harassment allegations two years earlier. The email was sent to the New York Daily News just two hours before the shooting Friday afternoon that left six other people wounded and Bello dead from a self-inflicted shot.

“This hospital terminated my road to a licensure to practice medicine,” the email said. “First, I was told it was because I always kept to myself. Then it was because of an altercation with a nurse.”

He also blamed a doctor for blocking his chances at practicing medicine.

Bello had warned his former colleagues when he was forced out in 2015 that he would return someday to kill them.

A law enforcement official said that Bello arrived at the hospital with the assault rifle hidden under his lab coat and asked for a specific doctor whom he blamed for his having to resign, but the physician wasn’t there at the time.

It was not clear if Bello knew Dr. Tracy Sin-Yee Tam, 32, who was killed in the shooting on the 16th and 17th floors of the hospital and was, like him, a family medicine doctor. Hospital officials said that Tam normally worked in one of the hospital’s satellite clinics and was covering a shift in the main hospital as a favor to someone else.

“It makes you think that anything can happen to anybody,” said Tam’s neighbor, Alena Khaim, 23, who saw Tam’s sister outside the home Friday night overcome with grief, shaking and unable to walk. “She was such a sweet girl. You would never think something like that would happen but it happened.”

Judy Beckles-Ross, 46, said she’s not surprised Tam volunteered to cover the shift.

“She never said no,” said Beckles-Ross, a friend from medical school who knew her for 11 years. “She had a good heart. Anybody that needed help, she would help them.”