As Police Hunt for Gunman, Fear Rattles Homeless People in 2 Cities

Anthony Pla, homeless since 2015 and a New Yorker for 35 years, said that until this weekend, he had never experienced anything as unsettling as the streets of Manhattan emptying out during the pandemic.

“I survived that,” Mr. Pla, 58, said Monday as he stood outside Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen on Ninth Avenue. “And now we have people killing each other.”

As Mr. Pla spoke, the police and federal agents in New York and Washington were fanning out in both cities in their search for a gunman who over the last two weeks shot five men who were sleeping in the streets, killing one in each city. One law enforcement official described the man as a serial killer.

In New York, investigators canvassed the street looking for video to help them identify the gunman and trace his steps. They searched encampments with outreach workers, looking for others he might have targeted, law enforcement officials said, and distributed fliers with pictures of a suspect, who had been caught on surveillance video in both cities. And they searched block by block for people sleeping on the streets, encouraging them to move into shelters for their own safety.

In Washington on Monday, the mayors and police officials of both cities pleaded for help finding the gunman.

“Someone knows this person,” said Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who appeared beside Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser. “We’re asking for the public to find him. We don’t want to lose another resident in this city, in New York or anywhere else.”

But many questions remain unanswered, including how the gunman traveled from Washington to New York and why he has targeted people living on the street.

Authorities said they connected the cases after a police captain investigating the killing of a homeless man in Washington saw a photo on social media of the suspect in the New York attacks. Ballistics analysis confirmed on Sunday that the same gun was used in all five shootings, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Police chiefs of cities along the East Coast discussed the attacks on Monday, but officials said they did not believe the gun was connected to any other crimes. Police in Philadelphia stepped up patrols in areas where homeless people congregate. Rewards for information increased to a total of $70,000.

In each of the shootings, which began March 3 in Washington, D.C., a lone gunman dressed in dark clothing targeted homeless men between midnight and dawn. The first killing was March 9 on New York Avenue Northeast in Washington, when a man was fatally shot and stabbed and his tent set on fire.

The next day, officials determined that the same gun was used in all three shootings in Washington, A.T.F. officials said.

Two nights later, on Saturday, two men were shot in New York. The first, a 38-year-old, was sleeping on a street near the Holland Tunnel when he was struck in the arm. He was treated at Bellevue Hospital and released.

A short time after the assault and less than a mile away, the second man was sleeping in a sleeping bag in the doorway of 148 Lafayette Street in SoHo. A surveillance camera recorded the gunman approaching and kicking him, then shooting him in the head and neck.

“He looked around, he made sure no one was there and he intentionally took the life of an innocent person,” Mr. Adams said. The victim, who was not carrying identification, was discovered dead late in the afternoon.

Abou Diakite, a local street vendor, said he had given the man $2 just last week so that he could buy coffee. He clicked his tongue in despair at the loss.

A third homeless man found dead in Manhattan on Sunday evening is believed to have died from a medical condition, the police said.

The shootings come at an extraordinarily anxious moment for the thousands of people who live unsheltered in New York City. They also recalled other serial attacks against homeless people in the city, including a 2019 spree that left four homeless men dead in Chinatown and the February 2021 stabbings of four homeless people in and around the subway, two of whom died.

And they come several weeks into a campaign by Mr. Adams to remove people who shelter in the subway system. Advocates for homeless people had warned that the effort would push many people to the street who refuse to stay in the city’s barrackslike group shelters, which they find rife with crime and interpersonal conflict.

In interviews in both cities, several homeless people said they were unnerved by the attacks, but not enough to move indoors.

“Listen, the streets are dangerous,” Marty Mercer, 51, said near his tent in the makeshift campground in front of Union Station in Washington Monday morning as commuters hurried by. “Just because someone is doing this on a serial basis is no different.”

Mr. Mercer, a former retirement planner from California, said that he and his friends had heard of at least two stabbings and a pepper-spray assault this winter. “We try to look out for each other,” he said.

In New York outside Holy Apostles, Ossie Andrew, 42, said that he was jumped while sleeping on a subway train about a month ago but that he still considered living in the streets and trains safer than group shelters.

“Once it’s late at night, those are risks that you take,” Mr. Andrew said.

In New York, people living on the streets and subways have been a growing source of concern during the pandemic.

A series of random attacks across the city, some of them fatal and committed by homeless people, according to the police, have led to homeless people being widely cast as a social menace that needs to be tamed.

Last month, Mr. Adams announced a wide-ranging plan to clear the subway of the people who live there. It includes sending more social workers and medical professionals into the transit system to offer services and more aggressive enforcement of rules against loitering. The mayor ordered the police to evict anyone using the subway for anything other than transportation.

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At a vigil on Sunday for the two men shot in Manhattan, Carl Garrison, a minister of homeless outreach at the Manhattan Church of Christ, said the demonization of the homeless was in part responsible for the current attacks. “You can’t talk about people as being vermin and being ‘disgusting animals’ without it having a repercussion,” he said. “Last night was the repercussion of this.”

The city has scrambled for years to create more housing of the sort that would entice homeless people off the street. Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, opened several thousand beds in so-called low-threshold shelters that offer private rooms and fewer rules and curfews than traditional shelters. But those rooms remain in short supply. Meanwhile, the city has stepped up its destruction of homeless encampments.

In the wake of the 2019 killings of four homeless men who were sleeping on the street in Chinatown, the city said it would build more shelters in the area. Recently, it announced plans to open three private-room shelters in Chinatown.

But, in part because of an increase in anti-Asian attacks, the proposed shelters have been loudly opposed. Shelter opponents quickly raised over $100,000 for a planned lawsuit. Last month’s Lunar New Year parade included demonstrators urging Mr. Adams to “save Chinatown” by canceling the shelters.

One of the proposed sites, scheduled to open later this year on Grand Street, is just seven blocks from where the man sleeping in the doorway was killed on Saturday.

In Washington, the homeless population has been declining for years, as more resources have been made available to homeless families and veterans. But as the city becomes ever less affordable, the number of chronically homeless single adults has not declined, and, according to the 2021 survey of the homeless, it rose during the pandemic.

Given the fears of the Covid-19 era, several advocates for the homeless said, more people had been living outside rather than in communal shelters. Some came together for safety in small clusters in parking lots or construction sites, while others set up tents on sidewalks outside of the sleek office buildings of downtown Washington.

The recent shootings show how crucial it is to address homelessness through programs like housing vouchers and other investments, said Christy Respress, the executive director of Pathways to Housing DC, a nonprofit group.

“Something like this makes it so clear the real dangers that people are facing outside, whether it’s dying of the elements or being exposed to horrific violence,” she said.

At Triangle Park in Washington, where he pitched a camping tent among 15 others two months ago, Kenneth Kiser, 58, was rattled.

Mr. Kiser said he first heard of the shootings Monday morning when he went to a methadone clinic for treatment. Clinic workers urged him to seek shelter and assured him the city had available beds.

But Mr. Kiser was not interested, saying he had $10 and some personal items stolen the last time he stayed at a men’s shelter.

“I sleep with one eye open anyway,” he said. “I’m always afraid that my throat will be slit or I’ll be robbed. So I’m careful.”

Sean Piccoli and Samira Sadeque contributed reporting from New York. Christopher Cameron, JoAnna Daemmrich and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting from Washington, D.C. Campbell Robertson contributed reporting.