NEW YORK — Three men were gunned down and killed in New York City Monday while another five were injured in shootings, making the past week far bloodier than the same time last year.
From July 2 to July 8, 77 people were shot in 62 shootings city-wide, according to NYPD statistics collected by the New York Post. Last year, 60 people were shot in 47 incidents in the same time period— a 32-percent leap in shooting incidents alone.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that the week of July 4 is regularly one of the most violent periods of the year.
"It’s true that this particular week of the Fourth of July traditionally has been a very high-crime shooting, murder week,” Bloomberg said in a Monday press conference. “I hope this week is just an aberration in the statistics, but we are working as hard as we can to stop it.”
However, there has been a sharp uptick in gun violence since Jan. 1. So far, 880 people have been shot in New York City this year, a nearly 10-percent increase from the 803 people shot during the same period last year.
Seventeen people were shot on July 4 alone. An NYPD officer was shot in the chest and wounded early the next day, and a three-year-old boy was shot in the leg in Brooklyn Sunday.
The violence continued Monday. Dante Sanders, 19, was shot and killed in Chelsea shortly after 2 a.m., a 30-year-old man was shot dead on a Crown Heights street about 4 p.m., and Juan Acosta, 21, was fatally shot in the head and torso in the University Heights section of the Bronx about 4:40 p.m.
