Woman dead, 2 other people hurt in Randall's Island shooting, NYPD says

Police said three people were shot, one fatally, on Randall’s Island early on Monday morning, after a man opened fire into a crowd of people celebrating the initial results of the presidential election in Venezuela.

Officers responded to a 911 call about a person shot at Field 71, on the south side of the island, around 3:30 a.m., according to the NYPD. There were roughly 50 people at the site who were marking the Venezuelan election about a quarter-mile from the migrant shelter, officials said.

Once they arrived, police found a 44-year-old woman with gunshot wounds to her face and back, a 31-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his throat and a 32-year-old woman with a gunshot wound to her back, police said. Both of the women were registered at the Randall’s Island shelter, but police could not confirm if the male victim was also registered there.

The male suspect then fled the scene on a moped, police said.

Authorities asked the public for help finding the alleged shooter during an evening press conference on Monday. They said he was a victim of an unreported gunpoint robbery and that the suspect had been acting in retaliation.

The 44-year-old woman was taken to Harlem Hospital and pronounced dead, according to the NYPD. The other two people, who were also taken to that hospital, were in stable condition.

Police blocked off parts of a park and parking lot under the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge on Monday morning. The area is about a five-minute walk from where the city opened a tent migrant shelter to house up to about 3,000 people last year.

An NYPD spokesperson said the three people shot on Monday were all migrants from Venezuela and had been partying under the bridge.

“Every night we hear a lot of noise there, like they have a disco or something,” shelter resident Claudia Miranda told Gothamist in Spanish, describing the space under the bridge. “People dance and they drink. … We try to avoid it."

Miranda said she hadn’t heard about the shooting and wasn’t sure if the people involved were fellow residents.

Police did not immediately release the name of the woman who died as they worked to notify her family.

On July 21, three men who were also Venezuelan migrants were killed in two shootings near a migrant shelter in the Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn, the NYPD said. Police have charged 26-year-old Jorge Said Benitez Villa with murder in the deaths of two of the men, who were shot outside the shelter on Ryerson Street. They haven’t yet announced any charges in connection with the other July 21 shooting, which happened just minutes earlier at a nearby park on Flushing Avenue and Steuben Street.

NYPD officials have also not released any information suggesting that they believe those shootings and the overnight ones on Monday were linked.

Gothamist’s map of shooting incidents in New York City shows only one shooting on Randall’s Island in the last four years. The map was built using comprehensive NYPD data that spans 2020 to June of 2024.

This story has been updated with new information.