NEW YORK—Two women were shot near Times Square Saturday night, as NYPD officers took aim at a man who was running through traffic on a busy street.
Spectators ran for cover as police fired at the man, sometime around 10 p.m.
Police said the man had reached into his pocket as if grabbing for a weapon.
The two officers, who fired a total of three shots, missed the man entirely, and instead hit a 35-year-old woman in the buttocks, and a 54-year-old woman in the right knee.
Speaking at a press conference Monday, Sept. 16, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the incident was very tragic and that Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is investigating.
“I don’t know what happened here. I don’t know whether the procedures were followed,” Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg said over the last 12 years the New York Police Department (NYPD) was very well managed compared to other cities on a per-capita basis. “The officers are well-supervised. And the officers themselves are very disciplined,” he said.
Bloomberg had requested statistics, and said that the number of police firing their weapons back in 1993 was 300. In 2001, when he entered office, 140 police fired weapons. Last year, a record low of 83 incidents, where police fired their weapons were recorded, “and we’re on pace for about 70 this year,” he added.
“Our sympathies go out. Thank God they were not fatal shootings,” Bloomberg said.
The man, identified as Glenn Broadnax, 35, of Brooklyn was eventually taken into custody after police used a stun gun on him.
Broadnax faces multiple counts including menacing, rioting, criminal possession of a controlled substance, and resisting arrest.
The encounter happened just before 10 p.m. near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, at the intersection of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, a block away from Times Square.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, speaking at an early morning news conference on Sept. 16, said it seemed that the man wanted to be hit by a car.
Photos and video taken by onlookers showed several officers trying to contain the man as he moved through an intersection. He was eventually brought down as people in the crowd yelled at police not to shoot him.
Broadnax was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he was in stable condition, police said. Authorities had described him as “emotionally disturbed.”
The two injured women were taken to hospitals, where they are both listed in stable condition without life-threatening injuries, police said.
Police did not release the names of the women, and said the officers who fired their weapons had been on the force for one and a half years and three years.
Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
