His well-dressed mark was strolling in Jackson Heights, on a bare and
blighted pedestrian plaza near 37th Road, off Broadway, around 1:55 p.m.
It seemed he could make a getaway through the thin crowd.
He most likely did not expect the firefighter who came sprinting after
him, throwing him off balance. Or the two strapping church missionaries,
young men visiting from North Carolina, who hurtled into the fray and
tackled him to the ground.
But none of them counted on the purse snatcher having a gun.
One missionary, Andre Aganbi, 19, a student at Duke University, had
spent the day on the plaza with his church group peers from Durham,
reading the Bible and chatting with passers-by about God. “We were
sitting right there, so I just jumped up, and as he tripped, I threw him
to the ground,” he said.
Mr. Aganbi, who pounced on the man along with Mark Haywood, 21, from the
church group, said he had glimpsed something polished and brown in the
pocket of the man’s cargo pants.
“He started slowly reaching for his pocket,” Mr. Aganbi said. “By the
time I thought about it, he grabbed the gun, pointed it at someone who
was behind him, lifted it up and shot it, and ran.”
The police said on Thursday night that the suspect was still at large.
The someone behind the gunman was a firefighter from Engine 287, who
happened to be on the corner of the plaza and had sprinted with others
after the man, his radio across his chest.
The shot came so close, it left graze marks on the firefighter’s shorts,
said Richard Torres, a firefighter with Engine 287 who was also at the
scene. The round hit a cellphone shop.
Within 10 minutes, the police had roped off the area. On the
trash-strewn plaza, which had been cleared of people, behind a barricade
of yellow caution tape, a bullet hole and the shooter’s navy baseball
cap remained.
And the young missionaries.
Their arms around each other in a prayer circle, they stood by as their
two friends were taken aside for questioning by detectives. With an
almost eerie level of calm, each of the young people thanked the Lord.
“If anything had happened to Andre or Mark, they would be going to
heaven, and they would be rejoicing with our Lord, because they trust in
Christ so completely,” said Katharine Batchelor, 18, who was traveling
with her peers on an eight-week mission from the Summit, a Southern
Baptist church based in Raleigh, N.C.
Her voice trembled. “It’s just a beautiful thing,” she said.
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