Bronx hospital gunman faced persistent struggles
Man who killed one dogged by financial woes, homelessness
NEW YORK — Fresh out of medical school in the Caribbean, Henry Bello took the first job he could get on the road to working as a doctor: a pharmacy technician with the city’s Health and Hospitals system. Then, in 2014, he got his break, when BronxLebanon Hospital Center took a chance on the sharp dresser from California, someone who, in his 40s, was arriving late to the profession. He was hired to be what the hospital described as a “house physician.”
With a limited permit from New York state to practice medicine as an international medical graduate, Bello was essentially an extra pair of hands for the department of family medicine at the 17-story hospital, one of the biggest and busiest in New York City. Sridhar Chilimuri, the hospital’s physician in chief, said Bello could treat patients and prescribe medication, as long as other doctors were looking over his shoulder, and only at BronxLebanon. “Not over there — not in a clinic,” he said for emphasis, pointing out the hospital’s doors.
But Bello’s slow journey to the medical profession, which was punctuated by bankruptcy, at least two arrests and recent sojourns in homeless shelters, came to a shattering end Friday, when he opened fire with an assault rifle on the 16th and 17th floors of the hospital. After killing one doctor and wounding six other people, he fatally shot himself in the head.
Exactly how — and why — Bello, 45, wound up sneaking an AM-15 under his lab coat on a sultry afternoon and inflicting mayhem is the subject of a wideranging police investigation, and is marked with as many questions as answers. But through records, accounts from hospital officials and interviews with former neighbors, a portrait is coming into focus of someone who strained to achieve professional success while dogged by financial troubles and possibly addiction.
His last known address was a homeless shelter run by Bellevue Hospital on East 30th Street. On Saturday morning outside the squat brick building, some residents said they had seen him there as recently as a week ago, despite hearing staff members tell investigators immediately after the rampage that he had officially moved out this past spring. He left the shelter in March with a Section 8 rent subsidy voucher.
Bello stood out among the shelter residents because of his neat dress, which consisted of slacks, button-down shirts and stylish glasses. “Mental health doesn’t discriminate: you could be a doctor, a lawyer, a judge,” said Richard Orta, 50, a resident who said he had overheard a detective interviewing the staff.
The Bellevue center was not the first shelterlike housing Bello had relied on. In 2014, the same year he was hired by Bronx-Lebanon, he lived at the Bowery Mission Men’s Center on Avenue D, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The 77-bed center, which is considered transitional housing, is designed specifically for formerly homeless men who are struggling with drug addiction.
In between the stints at the shelters, Bello lived for a year in a private apartment on East Second Street in the East Village, where neighbors said he made an impression by being unusually helpful and courteous. A resident in the building, who gave only her first name, Sonia, said that last year, Bello lived across the hall from her on the third floor in a small apartment with décor she described as minimalist.
“I was pregnant at the time,” she said, “and he’d carry boxes up and down without me even asking. He just offered. You see the stories after one of these shootings where neighbors say, ‘He was the nicest guy,’ but he really was.”
But Bello presented a different face at Bronx-Lebanon. On Friday, hospital officials said he left in 2015, in lieu of being terminated. The police said he resigned after an accusation of workplace sexual harassment.
Bello sent an email to The New York Daily News two hours before he opened fire inside the hospital, citing the “bogus complaints” made against him by the hospital. In the email, Bello said the hospital had terminated his progress toward a full physician’s license. “First I was told it was because I always kept to myself,” he wrote. “Then it was because of an altercation with a nurse.”
In the same email, he relayed that the hospital had cited an instance in which he had “threatened a colleague,” a fellow doctor. Bello wrote that he later emailed the colleague, “congratulating her for my termination after she sent out an email to everybody telling them to file complaints against me.”