A Brooklyn steel fabrication plant became the scene of a police standoff on Monday morning after a man shot two people in the building and then holed up inside. According to several reports, the still-unnamed 54-year-old walked into C & A Ironworks, at 13th Street and Hamilton Place in Gowanus, at around 11 a.m. and asked about getting a job there. “He was quiet, calm, nice, polite,” iron worker Dmitry Tabakin told the New York Daily News. After being sent upstairs to the management office, where he was rejected, the applicant came back down “looking nervous,” said another employee, Marcos Chantes. “He’s looking behind his back like someone is looking for him.”
The man then pulled out a .9 mm and began shooting at staffers, hitting two. He then barricaded himself in a storeroom for a nearly two-hour showdown with the cops. At one point, he threw out “a crude device with wires and a fuse,” but the Daily News reports that a bomb squad determined that it was just a harmless lead pipe. By 1:15, it was over: “45 minutes of dialogue and unprovoked he shot himself,” NYPD hostage negotiator Lieutenant Jack Cambria told DNAinfo. “We thought the dialogue was positive.” Meanwhile, both of the gunman’s victims were taken to Lutheran Hospital in critical condition.
