Suspect is captured in N.Y. grocery killing
WEST HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — An employee suspected of shooting three workers at an office inside a Long Island grocery store Tuesday, killing a manager, was arrested hours after fleeing, police said.
Gabriel DeWitt Wilson, 31, was taken into custody around 3:15 p.m. at an apartment building about two miles from the store, Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said.
The shooting happened around 11:15 a.m. inside offices upstairs from the shopping floor at the Stop & Shop supermarket in West Hempstead, Ryder said.
Ryder said Wilson, a shopping cart wrangler at the store, went to the offices immediately after arriving for work. The gunman wounded a man and a woman in one room before going down the hall and killing a 49-year-old store manager, Ryder said.
There were about a “couple hundred” shoppers inside the store at the time, he said.
“They told us to just run and get out, and that’s what we did,” shopper Laura Catanese told News 12 Long Island.
Barbara Butterman told Newsday she heard four or five shots while shopping for produce, initially thinking the sound was something falling in the back storeroom.
“Everyone was running around upstairs where (the) offices were,” Butterman told the newspaper.
The name of the victims haven’t been made public. The two wounded people were hospitalized but conscious and alert.
Wilson has a criminal record and had been taken into custody previously in Nassau County for a mental health evaluation, Ryder said.
Wilson was involved in a shooting in Baltimore seven years to the day before Tuesday’s supermarket shooting, records show. According to police, Wilson and another man shot at each other and were hospitalized with lower body wounds. Attempted murder charges against Wilson in that case were dropped, records show.
Wilson was arrested after officers — many in tactical gear and carrying long guns — converged on a neighborhood in nearby Hempstead, which is east of the grocery store.
Stop & Shop President Gordon Reid said in a statement that the company is “shocked and heartbroken by this act of violence” and that the West Hempstead store will remain closed until further notice.
The rampage followed a rash of recent mass shootings across the county, including one March 22 that left 10 people dead at a supermarket in Boulder, Colo.