Three people were killed and eight others wounded when multiple gunmen opened fire inside a crowded Brooklyn hookah lounge and restaurant early Sunday morning, according to authorities.
Police officers responded to reports of a shooting inside the Taste of the City lounge in Crown Heights just before 3:30 am, New York police department (NYPD) commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said at a press briefing later Sunday.
The three people who were killed were all men and were all pronounced dead at the scene. Two were ages 27 and 35, and it wasn’t immediately known how old the third slain victim was, police said. Of 11 victims, Tisch added, eight were men and three were women. Their known ages ranged from 27 to 61.
The eight wounded victims – five men and three women – were taken to local hospitals with what police said were non-life threatening injuries.
“We have multiple shooters involved in this shooting,” Tisch said Sunday. “We have recovered at least 36 shell casings.”
Officers had recovered one weapon near the scene of the shooting. But investigators had not immediately identified or detained any suspects.
Tisch made it a point to say New York City had registered “the lowest number of shooting incidents and shooting victims seven months in the year … on record”. Nonetheless, “it’s a terrible thing that’s happened”, she said.
“It’s a terrible shooting,” Tisch added. “There’s no other way to describe it”.
Taste of the City Lounge, located less than a half mile from the historic Brooklyn Museum serves American and Caribbean plates with a full bar, hookah and DJs. The business opened three years earlier and was the scene of another shooting in November 2024. That earlier case was non-fatal.
The typically Jewish and West Indian area where the shooting occurred has been undergoing rapid gentrification in recent years. In 2017, a bar advertising its “bullet-ridden” wall caused outrage, with residents accusing the owner of insensitive stereotyping that overlooked the realities of gang violence and its cost.
As of Sunday, there had been more than 270 mass shootings in the US this year – or 1.18 a day, according to the nonpartisan Gun Violence Archive. The online resource defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are wounded or killed. The US’s perennially high rates of such shootings have prompted calls from some in the country for more substantial gun control. But Congress has largely been unable or unwilling to heed those calls.