NASSAU COUNTY, N.Y. — Police have arrested a suspect in connection with a shooting inside a manager’s office at a suburban New York grocery store Tuesday morning that left one person dead and two others wounded.
Gabriel DeWitt Wilson, 31, was taken into custody around 3:15 p.m. at an apartment building roughly 2 miles from the Stop & Shop grocery store in West Hempstead, in Nassau County on Long Island where the shooting occurred, Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said.
The shooting occurred around 11:15 a.m. inside offices upstairs from the shopping floor, Fox News reported.
Wilson, a shopping cart wrangler at the store, went to the offices immediately after arriving for work, wounding a man and a woman in one room before going down the hall and killing a 49-year-old store manager, Ryder said.
The suspect fled the scene and remained at large for several hours.
Nassau County Executive Laura Curran tweeted around 3:15 p.m. — approximately four hours after the shooting — that DeWitt Wilson was in police custody. Charges are pending.
The names of the victims have not been made public.
“We probably had a couple of hundred shoppers in the store at the time,” Ryder said. “You saw the line trying to get out, we stopped to question to make sure we have anybody that was a witness. Their information is being given to a homicide unit who is doing the investigation.”
“They told us to just run and get out, and that’s what we did,” shopper Laura Catanese told News 12 Long Island.
https://twitter.com/NassauCountyPD/status/1384550853944791047?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1384550853944791047%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Fus%2Fshooting-suburban-new-york-grocery-store-wounded-manhunt-underway-reports-say
Another shopper, 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 offices were,” she told the newspaper.
Police named Wilson as a person of interest and described him as wearing a black baseball cap and a black sweatshirt. A motive for the attack was not yet disclosed, Fox reported.
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.
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 in 2014, records show. Police said Wilson and another man fired shots at each other and were hospitalized with lower body wounds. Attempted murder charges against Wilson in that case were later dropped, records show.
Curran told News 12 that law enforcement “cast a wide net to locate the shooter.” She said the shooting was “one of the most serious incidents we’ve had in a very, very long time.”
