A doctor wearing a white lab coat and armed with an AR-15 walked into the Bronx Hospital where he used to work and opened fire on several employees Friday, wounding six and killing one, before setting himself on fire and shooting himself in the head.
The gunman, 45-year-old Dr. Henry Bello, worked at the hospital for six months before he resigned in 2015 amid sexual harassment allegations, officials said. Bello’s colleagues said that he promised to return and kill them after he was forced to resign.
“We fired him because he was kind of crazy,” Dr. Maureen Kwankam, 50, who witnessed Bello’s shooting spree, told the Daily News.
“He promised to come back and kill us then,” Kwankam added.
Bello had a history of sexual harassment, as he was charged with sex abuse and unlawful imprisonment in 2004 after a 23-year-old woman accused him of grabbing her crotch on Bleecker Street in Manhattan.
The woman told officers he lifted her in the air and grabbed her crotch while saying “you’re coming with me.” Court records indicate that Bello pled guilty to unlawful imprisonment and was sentenced to community service, and the felony sex abuse charge was dropped.
The disgruntled doctor’s impulsiveness resulted in further legal trouble in 2009 when Bello was charged with unlawful surveillance after two woman reported him for using a mirror to look up their skirts. The case was later sealed.
Errol C. Schneer, the hospital’s vice president, said that hospital administrators were unaware of Bello’s criminal history when he was hired in August of 2014.
“At that time, and as a result of a human resources and security department background check, which includes fingerprinting, there was no record of any conviction for sexual abuse,” he told the New York Times.
Bello sent an email to the New York Daily News complaining about his treatment by hospital administrators roughly two hours before he went on the bloody rampage. Bello griped about the circumstances of his resignation in the email but did not threaten violence.
He attended the Ross University School of Medicine on the Caribbean island of Dominica, a New York State official told TheNYT. The state’s Education Department said that Bello was issued a temporary permit to practice medicine as an international medical school graduate in July of 2014.
The shooting spree occurred at 2:50 p.m. Friday on the 16th and 17th floors of the 972-bed hospital, which hosts over 1 million patients and more than 40,000 emergency room visitors each year.
The hospital’s employees acted quickly to treat the wounded while the hospital was still on lockdown, at one point using a fire hose as a tourniquet to treat a victim who was shot in a hallway. Of the five victims in critical condition is a family services physician, three are medical students and one is a gastrointestinal specialist. (RELATED: Former Doctor Kills 1 And Wounds 6 In Bronx Hospital Shooting)
Dr. Sridhar Chilimuri told TheNYT that the female doctor who died at the scene was shot in the chest. Her body was found next to the shooter on the 17th floor.
Norma Ruiz, a patient-care technician at Bronx-Lebanon, told TheNYT that she saw the gunman engulfed in flames on the floor where she works.
“He was running down the hall throwing himself on the floor,” she said. “We threw ourselves on the floor, and when everybody was quiet, my co-worker and me, we lift our heads, and the doctors’ station was on fire.”
Another unnamed mother said she hid in an exam room with her children and even resorted to breast feeding her 1-year-old to prevent his cries from drawing the attention of the gunman.
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