Fear growing that N.J. shooting targeted Jews

People work Wednesday to secure the scene left after Tuesday’s shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, N.J.
(AP/Seth Wenig)
People work Wednesday to secure the scene left after Tuesday’s shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, N.J. (AP/Seth Wenig)

JERSEY CITY, N.J. -- Fears that a deadly shooting at a Jewish market in Jersey City was an anti-Semitic attack mounted Wednesday as authorities recounted how a man and woman pulled up to the place in a rental van with at least one rifle and got out firing.

A day after the gunbattle and standoff that left six people dead -- the two killers, a police officer and three people who had been inside the store -- state and federal law enforcement officials warned they have not established the motive for the attack.

"The why and the ideology and the motivation -- that's what we're investigating," New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said, adding that authorities are also trying to determine if anyone else was involved.

But Mayor Steve Fulop said surveillance video of the attackers made it clear that they targeted the kosher market, and he portrayed the bloodshed as a hate crime against Jews, as did New York's mayor and governor.

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Also, investigators believe the two dead attackers -- who were thought to be a couple -- identified themselves in the past as Black Hebrew Israelites, a movement whose members have been known to rail against whites and Jews, according to a law enforcement official who was briefed on the matter but was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

In addition, authorities have found social media postings from at least one of the killers that were anti-police and anti-Jewish, the official said. The FBI on Wednesday searched the Harlem headquarters of the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, which is the formal name of the Black Hebrew group, according to the official.

The killers were identified as David N. Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50 -- both of them also prime suspects in the slaying of a livery driver found dead in a car trunk in nearby Bayonne over the weekend, Grewal said. Anderson served about four months in prison in New Jersey on weapons charges and was paroled in 2011, authorities said.

"The report from the Jersey City mayor saying it was a targeted attack makes us incredibly concerned in the Jewish community," said Evan Bernstein, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil-rights organization. "They want answers. They demand answers. If this was truly a targeted killing of Jews, then we need to know that right away, and there needs to be the pushing back on this at the highest levels possible."

The shooting in the city of 270,000 people across the Hudson River from New York City began at a graveyard, where detective Joseph Seals, a 40-year-old member of a unit devoted to taking illegal guns off the street, was gunned down by the assailants, authorities said. They then drove the van about a mile to the kosher market.

Grewal said that within seconds of pulling up to the market, Anderson got out with a rifle and immediately began shooting, and Graham followed him into the store. He would not say whether Graham had a weapon.

A pipe bomb was found in the attackers' van, FBI agent Gregory Ehrie said.

Jersey City's mayor said it was clear that the killers deliberately made their way toward the kosher market, passing many other possible targets along the way, and calmly and promptly opened fire.

"We shouldn't parse words on whether this is a hate crime at this point. This was a hate crime against Jewish ppl + hate has no place," he tweeted, adding: "Some will say don't call it anti-semitism or a hate crime till a longer review but being Jewish myself + the grandson of holocaust survivors I know enough to call it what this is."

The drawn-out battle with police filled the streets with the sound of high-powered rifle fire and turned the city into what looked like a war zone, with SWAT officers in full tactical gear swarming the neighborhood.

Five bodies were found at the store: the killers and three people who were inside at the time. Police said they were confident the bystanders were shot by the gunmen and not by police.

Two of the victims at the store were identified by members of the Orthodox Jewish community as Mindel Ferencz, 31, who with her husband owned the grocery, and 24-year-old Moshe Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was shopping there. The Ferencz family had moved to Jersey City from Brooklyn. The third victim was identified by authorities as Miguel Douglas, 49.

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A fourth person was shot and wounded at the store when attackers burst in, but escaped, Grewal said.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said on MSNBC that the attack was "clearly a hate crime," while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo pronounced it a "deliberate attack on the Jewish community." They announced tighter police protection of synagogues and other Jewish establishments in New York as a precaution.

Information for this article was contributed by Michael R. Sisak, Karen Matthews, Deepti Hajela, Wayne Parry, Michael Catalini and Rhonda Shafner of The Associated Press.

A Section on 12/12/2019

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