Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin warned of crime running rampant in the state on “Fox & Friends” Monday after a shooting took place half a block from his home.
Two people were shot outside of Zeldin’s Long Island home Sunday while his two 16-year-old daughters, Mikayla and Arianna, were doing homework on the first floor. Zeldin and his wife were at the Bronx Columbus Day Parade during the shooting.
“Unfortunately for New Yorkers, this wasn’t the only story yesterday,” said Zeldin, who represents New York’s 1st Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. “We were also reading about somebody else who got stabbed in the New York City subway. Somebody else who got slashed in the East Village.”
“And this is day after day after day, and there are a lot of parents — there are a lot of families — dealing with this reality of rising crime in New York,” he continued. “For us, fortunately my daughters knew exactly how to respond, but listen, they were just sitting there at the kitchen table doing homework and bullets started going off all around them.”
Zeldin said his daughters immediately locked themselves in the upstairs bathroom. One of them called 911 while the other called her parents. One of the bullets struck approximately 30 feet away from where his daughters were doing homework.
“This hits extremely close to home. It showed up at our front doorstep yesterday,” Zeldin told the hosts of “Fox & Friends.”
“When we were getting back to the house we had to go through crime scene tape, were getting advised to where to walk so we weren’t stepping on blood. This is not something that we were planning to return home to when we left for the Columbus Day parade in the Bronx,” he added.
Zeldin said four of his home security cameras captured footage of three individuals on his property. One of the men who was shot was lying underneath the porch, the other was in a bush in front of the porch and the uninjured person was moving around the porch and front yard.
The representative, who is running against Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, criticized the media for trying to “prop up” his opponent by burying the story of the shooting instead of addressing the rising crime rate. (RELATED: Zeldin Campaign Staffer Say Hochul’s Press Release Could Be A ‘Motivating Factor’ In Attack)
“The reality right now in this state is that New Yorkers don’t feel safe,” Zeldin said. “Even the former Democratic Gov. David Patterson — Democratic governor! — was making statements in an interview over the weekend about, even in the ’80s and ’90s, he didn’t feel as unsafe as he does right now. People aren’t riding the subway because they are afraid of being pushed in front of an oncoming subway car. You have people who are walking the streets with their head on a swivel, and if they have to go two blocks they’re calling an Uber rather than walking when they used to be willing to walk 20 blocks.”
In New York City, crime rose by 15% overall in Sept. 2022 from the previous year, the New York Police Department (NYPD) reported.