Police response to Empire State shooter questioned as evidence reveals officers’ gunfire injured nine passers-by while gunman fired no more bullets

Jeffrey Johnson lies subdued on the ground outside the Empire State Building in New York City while a police officer points his gun at him

The gunman tried to escape but nearby police – alerted by construction workers who’d witnessed the assassination – gunned him down.

Kelly, the police commissioner, said the officers who confronted Johnson had ‘a gun right in their face’ and ‘responded quickly, and they responded appropriately.’

‘These officers, having looked at the tape myself, had absolutely no choice,’ he said.

Acting immediately, the officers discharged 14 rounds and killed the gunman.

Johnson was struck at least seven times, of which police said some may have been exit wounds.

Johnson’s gun held seven rounds, ballistics evidence showed. He fired five times at Ercolino, one round was still in the gun and one was ejected when officers secured it, authorities said.

None of the passers-by’s injuries were life-threatening, police said. The seven men and two women injured – whose ages ranged from 20 to 56 – were whisked away to nearby hospitals. Six of the victims had been released by Friday evening.

Video footage taken by a bystander shows the moment directly after police had fired upon Jeffrey Johnson outside the Empire State Building in New York City

Ercolino had been walking to his office along West 33rd Street with a co-worker, 35-year-old Irene Timan, when Johnson appeared from behind the white van.

‘I saw him pull a gun out from his jacket, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to shoot him’ — and I wanted to turn and push Steve out of the way,’ said Timan.

‘But it was too late. Steve screamed, Jeff shot him, and I just turned and ran.’

Co-workers described a history of animosity between the pair that began when Ercolino joined Hazan Imports in 2005.

Detailing Johnson’s apparent dislike of confident and younger Ercolino, staff told MSNBC how their battle’s spilled out into the open and became physical.

‘If Steve needed something, rather than go to one of the owners, he’d go right to Jeff,’ the longtime employee said.

‘I need a sample in blue, right away.’ And Jeff wouldn’t take orders from him.

‘As time goes by, you could walk down the hallway and see an elbow being thrown or a shoulder being shoved, or a comment.’

Irene Timan also spoke of how Johnson would taunt Ercolino and push him in the corridors of Hazan Imports and detailed on specific encounter in April 2011.

Following a volley of gunfire from the police who are visible in the frame standing near, Johnson falls to the ground fatally wounded

‘Steve was leaving the elevator, Jeff was walking in, and Jeff elbowed him,’ she recalled.

‘Steve had finally had enough, so he grabbed Jeff by the throat, and said, ‘If you ever do anything like this again, I’m going to kill you.’

‘He went down to the precinct and called me from there, and he said, ‘You’re never going to believe this, but Jeff just left, and he filed a complaint against me!’

In the aftermath of yesterday’s terror, victims and witnesses are now suggesting that the police were too indiscriminate with their firing.

23-year-old Robert Asika was one of the nine injured; he was shot as he sold tickets for City Sights.

He accused police of ‘shooting randomly’ and told the Guardian: ‘If you wanna aim at the target, you got to know what you’re doing because it’s the street. I could have been dead right now. I could have been dead.’

Asika said that he didn’t start running when he saw others fleeing because he wanted to know what was going on. He was then shot in the right elbow.

Terrified for his life, Asika tried to crawl to the other side of the street. The 23-year-old told the Guardian: ‘I’d never been scared like that in my whole life.’

While being treated in hospital, Asika was visited by Mayor Bloomberg but confirmed that he has received no apology from police.

Robert Neequaye was also among the victims caught up in the shooting. His colleague, Rufai Mohammed, told the Wall Street Journal that he hoped the police ‘would be a little more cautious next time.’

Mohammed added that he knew the police were doing their work and said he wasn’t blaming them.

Another victim, Media Rosario, 43, had just emerged from the subway when she was shot, reported the Wall Street Journal.

Erica Solar, a mother-of-two who works as a receptionist on East 37th Street, was headed to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts when a stray bullet hit her in the back of her left knee.

Solar’s neighbour, Christopher Collins, who coincidentally stumbled upon her as she lay bleeding in the street, recalled to the Journal how she was nervous and kept asking if she would survive. 

The chaotic shootout in one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan was captured in shocking video footage.

Johnson can be seen in the graphic footage wearing a smart grey suit and carrying a briefcase as members of the public run for cover after he shot Ercolino.

Loss: Ercolino, pictured left with his nephew Matthew and right, was shot three times in the head at close range by Johnson. He was the vice president of clothing retailers, Hazan Imports

Suddenly, Johnson appears to be hit presumably by police gunfire and drops to his knees before falling flat on his face on the sidewalk outside the iconic skyscraper.

Johnson’s escape was scuppered after a construction worker saw the killing, chased him down the street and alerted police, who shot the gunman dead.

In the rush-hour ruckus, nine passers-by were injured. Two people – the gunman and his former boss – were killed.

The deadly dispute horrified tourists and workers swarming around 34th street and Fifth Avenue, a sight-seeing area that is experiencing its busiest few weeks of the year.

Johnson had visited clothing retailers Hazan Imports, where he had been an accessories designer for six years before he was fired when it downsized last year.

He was dressed in a smart grey suit and was carrying a briefcase, the New York Daily Newsreported.

In security camera footage released by the police, Johnson can be seen walking calmly down the sidewalk after the shooting, distancing himself slightly from the other pedestrians, who appear to have no awareness that anything is wrong.

But he was followed a block north by a construction worker who had witnessed the deadly shooting and alerted two police officers on duty outside the Empire State Building.

When the two police officers approached in a hurry, Johnson turned and pulled a handgun from a bag, his arm cocked as if to fire.

The officers, who had been standing nearly close enough to shake hands with Johnson and had no opportunity to take cover, fired almost immediately.

‘He tried to shoot at the cops,’ New York Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

When asked if the construction worker was the hero, Mayor Bloomberg responded: ‘He did what he should have done. When he saw something, he said something and then turned it over to the professionals.’

Johnson legally bought the gun in Sarasota, Florida, in 1991, but he didn’t have a permit to possess it in New York City, authorities said. Early reports did not indicate he had a criminal record.

The victim, Steven Ercolino, was vice president of sales at Hazan Imports and had worked with the company for nearly seven years, according to his LinkedIn page.

Police investigating Johnson’s killing of Ercolino were eyeing bad blood between them from when they worked together at Hazan Import, a garment district business where Ercolino was a vice president of sales.

Johnson and Ercolino had traded harassment accusations when they worked together, police said, and when Johnson was laid off from the company a year ago he blamed Ercolino, saying he hadn’t aggressively marketed his new T-shirt line.

He has been described as a gregarious salesman, beloved by his nieces and nephews as the fun uncle who could talk with equal expertise about the New York Jets and the women’s fashion accessories he sold.

A man who answered the phone at the home of Ercolino’s parents in the city’s suburbs said: ‘He was a good son.’

‘He was in the prime of his life,’ his eldest brother, Paul Ercolino,said. ‘He would do anything for anybody at any time. … He was so wonderful with my children. At Christmastime, he was the one who always had the best presents for the kids.’

Paul Ercolino said his brother, known to nieces and nephews as Uncle Ducky because of his nearly blond hair, had followed his father into the garment industry after growing up in Nanuet, just north of New York City, then later worked in women’s handbags and accessories. He said his brother had never mentioned to the family that he had any problems with a co-worker.

‘He was an incredible family man, loved his family,’ a woman who identified herself as Ercolino’s sister-in-law, told the Wall Street Journal.

‘People were yelling “Get down! Get down!”, Marc Engel, an accountant on a nearby bus, said. ‘It took about 15 seconds, a lot of “pop, pop, pop, pop”, one shot after the other.’

‘The gunshots were like a movie scene, everybody running in every direction and you can hear the gunshots everywhere not knowing where to run,’ witness Suzy El Ayoubi added on Twitter.

Aliyah Imam told Fox 5 News that she was standing at a red light when a woman next to her fell to the ground after being hit in the hip. She claimed the gunman was ‘shooting indiscriminately at people’.

Witness Kay Hudson, who said she was three feet away when a man was shot, said she heard seven shots then saw a man carrying an orange helmet lying on the ground.

Hudson said she began shouting for people to run and started fleeing down 33rd Street.

Jill Greenwood, who works as an account supervisor at Prosek Partners in the Empire State Building, told the Wall Street Journal that she heard several gun shots beginning at 9:04 a.m.

She said that people inside the building began yelling because an echo from the shots made it sound like the shooting was happening inside the building.

‘We heard these gunshots, it sounded like fireworks. So, we both got up and went to the window and looked down,’ Ms. Greenwood, 30, told the WSJ.

A Reddit user under the name of Titan413, said they were on a bus when they witnessed the shooting.

‘At least four people got shot,’ they wrote. ‘Two on the northwest side of the street, one Empire State Building ticket guy in the middle of the crosswalk, and someone on the southwest corner. That was terrifying.

‘At first I thought it was a truck going over one of those metal plates in the street, but then everyone on the bus got on the floor and people on the street started running.’

Helicopter footage apparently showed the gunman lying on a stretcher in handcuffs, before officers placed a white sheet over his body.

After the shootings, the sidewalks were awash with blood. Ercolino’s body was carried away in a body bag.

Witness George King told ABC News he watched several people around him struck by bullets.

‘I heard multiple gunshots, I’d say about 12 of them,’ he said.

‘I thought they were firecrackers, at first. I didn’t know what was going on. Everyone started running for cover along with me. The girl that was running next to me fell down to the pavement and, when I looked at her, I could see she had been hit in the leg. She was bleeding from the leg.

‘I noticed about five people who had been struck on the sidewalk or the street,’ he said.

A fire department spokesman said it received a call about the shooting just after at 9 a.m. and that emergency units were on the scene within minutes. The FBI quickly confirmed the shooting was not terror related.

‘What I want to do is assure everybody this is nothing to do with terrorism,’ Bloomberg said at the press conference.

‘Thank God nobody else was seriously injured. Again, there’s an awful lot of guns out there,’ the mayor, a staunch advocate of stricter gun laws, added.