88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
A Terrorist Attack in Lower Manhattan
By Anna Russell and Ben Taub
October 31, 2017
A man drove a rental truck down a bike path for more than twenty city blocks in lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, running over pedestrians and bicyclists, ramming a school bus, and killing eight people and injuring eleven others, in what the authorities called a terrorist attack.
The man exited the vehicle and brandished what the police later said was a paintball gun and a pellet gun and was then shot in the abdomen by an officer. “At first we thought it was an accident,” a woman who only gave her last name, Lin, said. She was picking up her child at a nearby school. “It was school-dismissal time, kids were all lingering around, it’s Halloween.” After the man rammed the school bus, “he got out of the car, staggered out, and almost started running,” she added. “He had guns in the air; then, before you knew it, the cops were there. We heard four shots fired.”
The attack, which occurred just blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks, was reminiscent of a series of recent attacks in Europe and the United States in which vehicles were used to attack civilians. The Islamic State has urged its followers to use trucks and cars as weapons to carry out attacks. The driver, Sayfullo Saipov, arrived in the United States from Uzbekistan in 2010 and was a legal permanent resident, the Times reported. Saipov, a twenty-nine-year-old resident of Paterson, New Jersey, was in police custody at a local hospital and is expected to survive.
“We have been tested before as a city,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference. “New Yorkers do not give in in the face of these kinds of actions. We will respond as we always do. We will be undeterred.”
Parents ran and screamed, searching frantically for children who were exiting nearby schools at the time, which included two elementary schools and a high school. All of the schools were placed on lockdown immediately after the incident. “People were running and screaming because it’s when people pick up their kids,” a woman who arrived a few minutes after the attack and asked not to be named said. “Just a lot of screaming and running . . . people who were very upset, parents running with strollers.”
Jeremy Moller, Omar Kastrat, and Leo Shestakov, all tenth graders at nearby Stuyvesant High School, said that they had just left school for the day and were standing outside a deli on Chambers Street when they heard a commotion. “We were in that dog park, in between two buildings, and people started running up to us, like, ‘Someone got hit, someone got hit,’ ” Shestakov said.
Moller described chaos. “When I went to look, the guy was in the middle of the West Side Highway carrying a gun and getting chased by, like, a big guy,” he said. “I think he was just a random pedestrian who, like, stepped up or something, ’cause the police weren’t there yet,” Moller said. “When the police came to try and close him down, he started running back towards the street. . . . It was scary because the guy had the gun out in his hand and he looked kind of shaky, like he didn’t know what he wanted to do.”
“Everyone started freaking out, people started grabbing their kids and stuff, everyone got scared,” Moller said.
Crystal Owens was delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service in an apartment building near Stuyvesant High School when the commotion started. “I was delivering mail and the residents started coming in all panicky. They were starting to say, you know, ‘What happened?’ ” She left her truck where it was and decided to do the rest of her route on foot. “Just to hear of it, it’s heartbreaking. You see all the children about to go out and have fun—you know, Halloween.”
An hour after the attack, a group of parents stood in front of a police cordon, waiting for their children to leave P.S. 89, an elementary school on Warren Street. Police officers, dressed in blue and trying to manage the crowds, shouted, “Just wait, just wait. Your children are coming.” A door opened, and dozens of kids trudged out, eating chips and candy. Some wore Halloween costumes. There was a girl in a princess dress and a boy in a Batman outfit. They mostly seemed not to know what had happened, and they calmly found their parents, who strained to mask their panic by waving and smiling broadly as their children approached. A press scrum materialized along the corner of the police cordon, and cameras clicked. “No pictures of kids! They’re underage!” a policeman yelled. One mother left the scene pushing a stroller, sobbing.
At the time of the attack, on West Street, Annie Thoms, an English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, was leading a class discussion on Amy Tan’s book “The Joy Luck Club” in Room 838. Stuyvesant looms over the scene. Just afterward, an assistant principal came on the loudspeaker telling everyone that classes would be on a “shelter in” status, with no one allowed in or out of the building. Everyone was to stay put and pass the time. Speaking by phone after 6 p.m., Thoms said that she had been with her twenty-eight students for three hours.
“We were talking about the different ways we have to make choices in thecultures we are part of. We talked about it in our personal lives and in Amy Tan’s narrative,” she said. “Especially after 9/11, every time I see that something is a terrorist incident, and someone has said ‘Allahu Akhbar,’ I feel a pit in my stomach, because terrorism is the evil opposite of what Islam is. So many of our kids here at Stuyvesant are Muslim, and they fear being tarred with this kind of thing.”
The classroom faces north, and Thoms and her students could hear sirens on the street. They figured there had been a terrible accident. But then Thoms’s husband called to tell her what had happened. She then told her students to get out their phones and call their families to tell them they were O.K. Thoms, who went to Stuyvesant herself and was a teacher at the school during the 9/11 attacks, said the students were “of course” worried about what was going on, but they also managed to pass the time calmly. They wrote chemistry formulas and Chinese lessons on the blackboard. They sang. They braided one another’s hair. They played online games.
“They remained very calm even in the face of knowing something was very wrong,” Thoms said. “They are a super group of ninth graders. But it’s also a hard thing.”
“There were other students who saw and heard things, awful things, heard gunshots, or saw the guy crashing his vehicle, so others clearly felt a more active sense of danger,” she went on. “But my ninth graders here didn’t. They are old enough and aware enough that this is something terrifying, and yet they are who they are. From 9/11, it’s burned in my memory: after we evacuated the school, some kids kind of danced down the stairs, not because they weren’t scared but they had to find some life. You have to be human. You can’t be terrified all the time. And if you are thirteen and fourteen, especially, you can take it in, but you can’t let it overwhelm you.” She said she waited until the students were on their way home to cry.
Jonathan Blitzer contributed reporting.
A Terrorist Attack in Lower Manhattan
By Anna Russell and Ben Taub
October 31, 2017
A man drove a rental truck down a bike path for more than twenty city blocks in lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, running over pedestrians and bicyclists, ramming a school bus, and killing eight people and injuring eleven others, in what the authorities called a terrorist attack.
The man exited the vehicle and brandished what the police later said was a paintball gun and a pellet gun and was then shot in the abdomen by an officer. “At first we thought it was an accident,” a woman who only gave her last name, Lin, said. She was picking up her child at a nearby school. “It was school-dismissal time, kids were all lingering around, it’s Halloween.” After the man rammed the school bus, “he got out of the car, staggered out, and almost started running,” she added. “He had guns in the air; then, before you knew it, the cops were there. We heard four shots fired.”
The attack, which occurred just blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks, was reminiscent of a series of recent attacks in Europe and the United States in which vehicles were used to attack civilians. The Islamic State has urged its followers to use trucks and cars as weapons to carry out attacks. The driver, Sayfullo Saipov, arrived in the United States from Uzbekistan in 2010 and was a legal permanent resident, the Times reported. Saipov, a twenty-nine-year-old resident of Paterson, New Jersey, was in police custody at a local hospital and is expected to survive.
“We have been tested before as a city,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference. “New Yorkers do not give in in the face of these kinds of actions. We will respond as we always do. We will be undeterred.”
Parents ran and screamed, searching frantically for children who were exiting nearby schools at the time, which included two elementary schools and a high school. All of the schools were placed on lockdown immediately after the incident. “People were running and screaming because it’s when people pick up their kids,” a woman who arrived a few minutes after the attack and asked not to be named said. “Just a lot of screaming and running . . . people who were very upset, parents running with strollers.”
Jeremy Moller, Omar Kastrat, and Leo Shestakov, all tenth graders at nearby Stuyvesant High School, said that they had just left school for the day and were standing outside a deli on Chambers Street when they heard a commotion. “We were in that dog park, in between two buildings, and people started running up to us, like, ‘Someone got hit, someone got hit,’ ” Shestakov said.
Moller described chaos. “When I went to look, the guy was in the middle of the West Side Highway carrying a gun and getting chased by, like, a big guy,” he said. “I think he was just a random pedestrian who, like, stepped up or something, ’cause the police weren’t there yet,” Moller said. “When the police came to try and close him down, he started running back towards the street. . . . It was scary because the guy had the gun out in his hand and he looked kind of shaky, like he didn’t know what he wanted to do.”
“Everyone started freaking out, people started grabbing their kids and stuff, everyone got scared,” Moller said.
Crystal Owens was delivering mail for the U.S. Postal Service in an apartment building near Stuyvesant High School when the commotion started. “I was delivering mail and the residents started coming in all panicky. They were starting to say, you know, ‘What happened?’ ” She left her truck where it was and decided to do the rest of her route on foot. “Just to hear of it, it’s heartbreaking. You see all the children about to go out and have fun—you know, Halloween.”
An hour after the attack, a group of parents stood in front of a police cordon, waiting for their children to leave P.S. 89, an elementary school on Warren Street. Police officers, dressed in blue and trying to manage the crowds, shouted, “Just wait, just wait. Your children are coming.” A door opened, and dozens of kids trudged out, eating chips and candy. Some wore Halloween costumes. There was a girl in a princess dress and a boy in a Batman outfit. They mostly seemed not to know what had happened, and they calmly found their parents, who strained to mask their panic by waving and smiling broadly as their children approached. A press scrum materialized along the corner of the police cordon, and cameras clicked. “No pictures of kids! They’re underage!” a policeman yelled. One mother left the scene pushing a stroller, sobbing.
At the time of the attack, on West Street, Annie Thoms, an English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, was leading a class discussion on Amy Tan’s book “The Joy Luck Club” in Room 838. Stuyvesant looms over the scene. Just afterward, an assistant principal came on the loudspeaker telling everyone that classes would be on a “shelter in” status, with no one allowed in or out of the building. Everyone was to stay put and pass the time. Speaking by phone after 6 p.m., Thoms said that she had been with her twenty-eight students for three hours.
“We were talking about the different ways we have to make choices in thecultures we are part of. We talked about it in our personal lives and in Amy Tan’s narrative,” she said. “Especially after 9/11, every time I see that something is a terrorist incident, and someone has said ‘Allahu Akhbar,’ I feel a pit in my stomach, because terrorism is the evil opposite of what Islam is. So many of our kids here at Stuyvesant are Muslim, and they fear being tarred with this kind of thing.”
The classroom faces north, and Thoms and her students could hear sirens on the street. They figured there had been a terrible accident. But then Thoms’s husband called to tell her what had happened. She then told her students to get out their phones and call their families to tell them they were O.K. Thoms, who went to Stuyvesant herself and was a teacher at the school during the 9/11 attacks, said the students were “of course” worried about what was going on, but they also managed to pass the time calmly. They wrote chemistry formulas and Chinese lessons on the blackboard. They sang. They braided one another’s hair. They played online games.
“They remained very calm even in the face of knowing something was very wrong,” Thoms said. “They are a super group of ninth graders. But it’s also a hard thing.”
“There were other students who saw and heard things, awful things, heard gunshots, or saw the guy crashing his vehicle, so others clearly felt a more active sense of danger,” she went on. “But my ninth graders here didn’t. They are old enough and aware enough that this is something terrifying, and yet they are who they are. From 9/11, it’s burned in my memory: after we evacuated the school, some kids kind of danced down the stairs, not because they weren’t scared but they had to find some life. You have to be human. You can’t be terrified all the time. And if you are thirteen and fourteen, especially, you can take it in, but you can’t let it overwhelm you.” She said she waited until the students were on their way home to cry.
Jonathan Blitzer contributed reporting.
A Terrorist Attack in Lower Manhattan
