The getaway vehicle was not a rental bike. That was established all the way back on Wednesday evening.
According to this BBC article, citing a CBS article, the police have over 200 images of the suspect.
Police have put together more than 200 images of the suspect from his arrival in New York until he fled Midtown Manhattan after shooting Thompson, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
That fits with the idea that they’ve only released the ones that are most likely to lead to identification.
My point being, is it safe to stash a bike in the middle of the city? Presumably locked (Make sure you bring the key!). Even with the battery missing and locked, a bike hiding in an alley is a prime target for theft. And what’s Plan B if you arrive in the morning and the bike is missing?
Here’s an article that includes two new photos police released a few hours ago, One shows him through the partition of a taxi, and the other, taken from inside a car, show him walking beside the vehicle.
The article says
The NYPD has said investigators have been able to track some of his movements by taxi.
So he apparently took at least one taxi. To the scene? From the scene?
The taxi was to the bus terminal after the shooting, after he disposed of the getaway bike.
Ah. Makes sense. Thank you.
I shouldn’t be, but I’m always surprised at how much we’re tracked and photographed nowadays. I wonder how many images exist of me, from a simple trip to the pharmacy?
The handgun has been identified as a Veterinary Pistol, used to put down farm animals.
Just Citi Bikes, which you get from various stations and have to be dropped off in other stations. No scooters and no “leave-anywhere” bikes or e-bikes. And, of course, you need a credit card to use the Citi bikes, so they would be pretty traceable for a would-be assassin.
At least the NY Post … at least as of yesterday afternoon … doesn’t believe there’s certainty on this question:
A picture of the gun in question:
Has video of the shooting been released? I’ve only seen stills, but there’s been much talk about the gun not cycling properly and having to be manually cycled between shots. The vet gun is obviously not a semi-automatic so something doesn’t add up there.
I am far from a gun expert, but I believe the gun did not jam, but since it is not a full-automatic, has to have the bolt pulled from the rear after a shot, rotated about a 1/4 turn, then pushed back in place to be ready to fire. At first glance, that might look like a jam-clearing action, but probably isn’t.
I don’t believe the vet gun has a magazine, it’s a single shot. I don’t know what the bolt looks like but you can see from the photo above that it’s not a pull back action like a semi auto.
I’m assuming the NYPD isn’t dumb but this new information doesn’t make sense to me given the previous reporting.
I don’t understand what evidence leads you to say this so confidently.
Some evidence that the pictures are the same person lies in the fact that no one has come forward or been identified in the flirting picture.
If it were a different person, the innocent person would have likely come forward or been identified by now as ‘not a lead’
Because I can see from the surveillance video that this is not a B&T Station SIX-9/VP9, a Welrod, or a Bell Gun (an actual veterinarian “humane killer”), and because while I have not fired any of those weapons (although I’ve handled and cycled a VP9), I have fired hundreds of semi-automatic short recoil action pistols, and what the shooter is doing is quite evidently clearing a failure to return to battery with a standard tap-rack-bang drill; hence, why it is reported that there were found three fired cases and three unfired cartridges, as with every failure the shooter manually cycled the slide, ejecting a partially chambered but unfired cartridge. The action on a V&T SS9 or VP9 involves twisting the bolt open by clutching a knurled knob at the back of the gun, rotating the gun upside down to cause the cartridge to fall out of the chamber (because there is no ejector), and then rotating the bolt back to pick up another cartridge from the magazine, as shown in the videos in the post linked above. A ‘Bell Gun’ (actually numerous types) is a single shot pistol that has to be partially disassembled to eject the spent case and load a new cartridge.
In this case, it is quite clear that the shooter is using a standard striker-fired pistol (I would guess a Glock or Springfield XD because they are ubiquitous and easy to find threaded barrels to take a suppressor but the video is too grainy identification) with what is likely either a homemade or cheap suppressor that was not correctly fitted to the gun (did not install a stiffer recoil spring or it is interfering with the slide upon return to battery), causing the gun to repeatedly malfunction. You can see a puff of smoke coming up from the open ejection port while the gun is cycling, which would not happen with the manual bolt action of a VP9/SS9 or a Welrod, and these guns are likely too expensive and exotic for a shooter to easily procure (particularly the WWII-era Welrod, which was never imported to the United States in quantity and is a highly sought after collector’s item). It is also clear that while the shooter knows basic firearm use and how to clear a failure, they are not some kind of highly trained “professional assassin” (a breed of expert criminal which, outside of state-sponsored covert action and terrorism, exists almost exclusively in the minds of screenwriters because the economics of that vocation don’t really favor it) because someone who knew what they were doing would have gotten much closer, put the rounds into the back of the head, and would likely have used a smaller caliber weapon like a .32 ACP or even a .22 LR, which require a much smaller suppressor and are plenty lethal at near contact range.
Any time you hear anything about the details of a firearm or its use in the media you should discount it as false or at least mangled until verified by someone who is actually familiar with firearms because the vast majority of journalists know virtually nothing about firearms and just repeat what they heard someone else say even if it is obviously wrong.
Stranger
The video is very easy to find on txitter using common sense search words. No doubt it’s many other places on the internet.
Can someone just link to it? Can we stop being children about “graphic content?” I refuse to sign up for Twitter and a standard Google search returns pages of news stories that don’t show the video.
Without seeing it for myself I’m left to believe, based on one man’s confidence, that an investigative organization that deals daily with murders using cheap semi-automatic pistols has made a blunder noticeable to anyone who’s fired a semi-automatic pistol before. Which includes literally every member of said organization.
Heck, even after the seeing the video, if I do, that’s a hard position to take. Do you share Stranger’s confidence that the NYPD is a bunch of drooling morons?
I’d also like to see a news story that mentions the 3 unfired rounds. I’ve read about the shell casings but I’ve only learned about the supposed rounds from comments and I’m not convinced that internet randos understand how ammunition works.