Hospital ‘shooter’ panic
A mistaken report about a shotgun-toting man in a maternity ward drew a massive police response to a tony Westchester County village Sunday night.
Cops got a call about an armed man on the sixth floor of New YorkPresbyterian Hospital Lawrence in Bronxville at about 8:45 p.m., village Police Chief Christopher Satriale said early Monday.
Cops from several agencies swarmed Palmer Ave., ordering customers and workers at nearby restaurants to stay indoors as they searched the hospital floor by floor.
Video from the scene tweeted by a reporter for LoHud.com showed the large police presence, which included New York State Police and Westchester County officers.
“One second it was nothing, and then it was like 30 cops just swarmed in. It was like a movie scene,” Seth Levin, general manager of Rosie’s Bistro Italiano, told the Daily News.
Police spent hours reviewing video surveillance, searching for evidence of a man walking the halls with a gun — but found nothing, Satriale said.
“Those cameras confirmed there was not an individual in the hospital armed with a long gun, shotgun, rifle or handgun,” he said. “I can confirm there were no shots fired in the hospital, and we’re confident there was no one in the building that was armed with a shotgun.”
A nursing supervisor contacted police after patients on the sixth floor called, worried about a man approaching an elevator carrying a shotgun.
Surveillance camera footage showed that the patients were mistaken, and that the man they saw was carrying something else, Satriale said.
“This was not a malicious call,” said the chief. “They truly believed they saw a gentlemen armed with a weapon.”
A woman who gave her name as Mary and said she was in the hospital’s emergency room when cops arrived.
“They just told us to leave, that’s it,” Mary said. “They just told us to leave very nicely, and everybody was calm.
“The police came in but they were very discreet and very respectful and very professional,” she added. “They had guns and they had their equipment on.”
The hospital on Sunday night asked people to stay away. “Please do not come to the hospital tonight unless it is an emergency,” the hospital said on Twitter.