Jersey City shooting at JC Kosher Supermarket: Latest news about New Jersey gun battle

The suspects fled a cemetery where they had gunned down the officer, then drove slowly through the city, stopped in front of Jersey City Kosher Supermarket and opened the vehicle door, Fulop told reporters. A male suspect emerged with two long rifles, he said, and “began firing from the street into the facility.”

Authorities are still investigating and have not officially indicated a motive for the attack, which unsettled the growing community of Orthodox Jews in Jersey City. Before the mayor’s Wednesday tweets, investigators had said the kosher store was chosen at random and was not indicative of a hate crime.

But Fulop, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Jewish leaders in the region are characterizing the attack as an act of anti-Semitism.

“I’m Jewish and proud to live in a community like Jersey City that has always welcomed everyone,” Fulop wrote on Twitter. “It is the home of Ellis Island and has always been the golden door to America. Hate and anti-semitism have never had a place here in JC and will never have a place in our city.”

In a statement Wednesday morning, de Blasio said the shooting “confirms that a growing pattern of violent anti-Semitism has now turned into a crisis for our nation.”

“And now this threat has reached the doorstep of New York City,” de Blasio said.

Law enforcement officials have not formally identified the two suspects. Two of the bystanders killed at the store were members of the Jersey City Jewish community and former Williamsburg residents, officials said at the de Blasio news conference. A third bystander was an employee at the store.

The slain officer was identified as Jersey City Police Detective Joseph Seals. He was shot by the suspects as he approached them at Bayview Cemetery in the city’s Greenville neighborhood, Jersey City Police Chief Michael Kelly said. According to reporting from the New York Times, the suspects were inside a U-Haul vehicle that had been linked to a homicide over the weekend.

The attackers then fled to the kosher market, where they exchanged more fire with authorities and were killed.

“Our officers were under fire for hours,” the chief said.

Seals, a 15-year veteran of the Jersey City force, was a father of five, authorities said. In recent years, Seals led the police department in the number of illegal guns removed from the city’s streets, reported the Associated Press.

“He was a good cop,” Kelly said.

Two other officers were also shot, Kelly said. They were treated and released from the hospital.

“It’s a really tough day for the city of Jersey City,” Fulop, the mayor, said at a news conference Tuesday evening.

“He told me he had just walked out of the store into the synagogue not five feet away just before this happened, and then he couldn’t get back for hours,” Schapiro told the AP. “His wife was inside the store. He said, ‘I hope my wife is safe.’”

Officials have not disclosed the identities of the suspects or of the others killed at the store. But they described a difficult and dangerous episode that began shortly after noon in a residential community, near schools and stores, further complicated by the two suspects’ near-constant movement.

“Their movement was rapid and continuous for four hours within that area,” Kelly said.

Police also recovered the stolen U-Haul vehicle that Kelly said “may contain an incendiary device” and that bomb squads were investigating.

Video and photographs from the scene showed throngs of heavily armed officers from a patchwork of agencies converging on the northeastern New Jersey city, which sits between Newark and the southern tip of Manhattan. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Newark said its agents responded, along with other New Jersey authorities and special operations officers from the New York Police Department.

Across the street from the convenience store where the gun battle ended, students and staff at Sacred Heart School sheltered in place, a spokeswoman told The Washington Post, adding that all were safe.

The violence also prompted lockdowns in all 43 of the city’s public schools, Jersey City Board of Education President Sudhan Thomas told local media.

“All students and staff are safe,” the School District of Jersey City said in a statement.

“Today reminds us of their bravery and the sacrifices they, and their families, make for our communities,” Murphy said.

The state’s police officer union said that its “officers have come under attack and we have several wounded.”

“Today is a horrific day,” the New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association said in a tweet. In another, the union added: “We need a lot of prayers right now for Jersey City officers.”