In the wake of two shootings at basketball courts in city parks, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly will assign more cops to patrol recreational basketball games throughout the city. “I can’t give you the reason why it’s happening at basketball tournaments, I don’t know,” Kelly told reporters yesterday. “Obviously at these events, we are going to have to use our resources, as well, now to add an additional level of security." The organizer of the Harlem game that ended with five people shot on Wednesday night, called the Entertainers Basketball Classic, says the police presence was slashed from 10 to two before the game.
“We haven’t been able to do what we normally do to keep our safety,” Greg Marius, runs the famous event, tells the Daily News. It's unclear whether the event, which takes place in Harlem's famed Rucker Park, hired fewer off-duty police officers to do security, or if fewer on-duty cops were dispatched by the NYPD. Police spokesman Paul Browne says there were “several police officers” and “10 private security” guards at the game, and that the department is now planning "beefed-up police coverage in the wake of the shooting."
No arrests have been made in the Rucker Park shooting, and investigators still aren't sure what caused the violence, which started in the bleachers. Police sources tell the Post the shooting may have been sparked by someone forgetting to say, "Excuse me." "One guy bumped into another guy from another group,” one law-enforcement source told the tabloid.
“I was watching the basketball game and I heard, like, three shots,” Messiah Ortiz, a 10th-grader at the Frederick Douglass Academy, told the News. “I started running and it felt like someone pinched me. I looked down and there was a hole in my pant leg. I was bleeding.” Kelly says investigators have obtained video that shows "someone wearing a lime green shirt; took out a gun, shot four people in the vicinity of the basketball court, one of them being the players and chased another individual across the street and shot that individual." Here's cellphone video showing the moments leading up to the shooting:
