Another New “Normal”: Cops Randomly Shooting At Innocent Bystanders While “Shooter” Doesn’t

(NaturalNews) All nine of the bystanders who were injured in yesterday’s Empire State Building shooting incident were shot by police, the media is now reporting. NYPD officers “fired randomly” into the street, striking nine bystanders in the legs, buttocks and elbow. The gunman, Jeffrey Johnson, had only one intended target: his former boss. Johnson never fired at police, it turns out, despite Mayor Bloomberg’s initial description claiming he did.

The Guardian is now reporting: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/24/empire-state-building-sho…)

Questions have been raised over the New York police department’s handling of a shooting near the Empire State Building after armed officers injured nine passers-by as they pursued a gunman who had just shot dead his former boss.

One of those injured by police told the Guardian that officers appeared to fire “randomly” as they confronted Jeffrey Johnson, 58, minutes after a workplace dispute escalated into a chaotic shootout in one of the busiest parts of Manhattan.

Reports suggest that while Johnson drew his gun when he was confronted by officers, he did not fire; all those injured appear to have been shot by police.

In other words, this was no random attack. This wasn’t a wild, rampaging shooter. The real damage to the public was done by the NYPD, whose officers apparently can’t hit the broad side of a barn at fifty yards.

The Guardian continues:

Robert Asika was among those wounded, shot in the elbow from a distance of around eight feet by one of the two police officers who confronted Johnson. He accused police of “shooting randomly”, and said he saw at least two others hit by police bullets.

“If you’re gonna aim try and aim perfectly. If you wanna aim at the target, you got to know what you’re doing because it’s the street,” Asika said. “I could have been dead right now. I could have been dead.”

The NYPD has offered Asika no apology.

NYPD Gunfire Injures 9 at Empire State Building

ABC News

The veteran patrolmen who opened fire on a gunman outside the Empire State Building had only an instant to react when he whirled around and pointed a .45-caliber pistol at them as they approached him from behind on a busy sidewalk.

Officer Craig Matthews shot seven times, and Officer Robert Sinishtaj fired nine times, police say. Neither had ever fired their weapons before on a patrol.

The volley of gunfire felled Jeffrey Johnson in just a few seconds and left nine other people bleeding on the sidewalk.

In the initial chaos Friday, it wasn’t clear whether Johnson or the officers were responsible for the trail of the wounded. But based on ballistic and other evidence, “it appears that all nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired by police,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters Saturday at a community event in Harlem.

Police officials have said the officers appeared to have no choice but to shoot Johnson, whose body had 10 bullet wounds in the chest, arms and legs.

Police determined that three people were struck by whole bullets — two of which were removed from victims at the hospital — and the rest were grazed “by fragments of some sort,” Kelly said.

Two women with leg wounds and a man with a wound to his buttocks required surgery and remained hospitalized Saturday. They were listed in stable condition.

Both Matthews, 39, and Sinishtaj, 40, joined the nation’s largest police department 15 years ago. The union representing the two officers didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Prozac? Zoloft? Paxil? Did one of these drugs drive the Empire State shooter?

Saturday, August 25, 2012 by: Jon Rappoport

(NaturalNews) Jeffrey Johnson, a disgruntled ex-employee of a Manhattan company, Hazan Imports, is accused of killing a former co-worker before engaging police in a shootout that left two people dead and nine wounded at the Empire State Building.

In assessing possible reasons for the attack, police and FBI will omit one glaring possibility: Johnson’s festering resentment was ignited and driven over the edge by an SSRI antidepressant: Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, etc.

On September 14, 1989, in Louisville, Kentucky, another disgruntled ex-employee, Joseph T Wesbecker, entered the premises of his former company, Standard Gravure, killed eight people, and wounded 12. He then killed himself.

A month earlier, Wesbecker had started on a course of Prozac. Eventually, the people he wounded, and families of the deceased, filed a lawsuit against Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, claiming that the drug had pushed Wesbecker into murder.

At the time, Lilly was facing a number of potential lawsuits on this very issue, and the Wesbecker case was crucial to establishing a precedent. Lilly knew Prozac could induce violence. If they lost the Wesbecker case, they would face a flood of similar court actions and a loss of business and reputation.

An instructive article, “Protecting Prozac,” by Michael Grinfeld, in the December 1998 California Lawyer, describes the astonishing Wesbecker trial.

Grinfeld details a set of maneuvers involving attorney Paul Smith, the plaintiffs’ lead counsel.

After what many people thought was a very weak attack on Lilly by lawyer Smith, the jury came back in five hours with an easy verdict favoring Lilly and Prozac.

Grinfeld writes, “Lilly’s defense attorneys predicted [their victorious] verdict would be the death knell for [anti-]Prozac litigation.”

“Rumors began to circulate that [prior to the trial] attorney Smith had [illegally] made several oral agreements with Lilly concerning the evidence that would be presented, the structure of a postverdict settlement, and the potential resolution of Smith’s other [anti-Prozac] cases.”

In other words, the rumors said: This lawyer made a deal with Lilly to present a weak attack, to omit evidence damaging to Prozac, so that the jury would find Lilly innocent of all charges. In return for this, the case would be settled secretly, with Lilly paying out monies to Smith’s clients. In this way, Lilly would avoid the exposure of a public settlement, and through the favorable verdict would discourage other potential plaintiffs from suing over Prozac.

The rumors congealed. The judge in the case, John Potter, asked lawyers on both sides if “money had changed hands.” He wanted to know if the fix was in. The lawyers said no money had been paid.

Judge Potter didn’t stop there. In April 1995, Grinfeld notes, “In court papers, Potter wrote that he was surprised that the plaintiffs’ attorneys [Smith] hadn’t introduced evidence that Lilly had been charged criminally for failing to report deaths from another of its drugs to the Food and Drug Administration.”

Judge Potter alleged that “Lilly sought to buy not just the verdict, but the court’s judgment as well.”

In 1996, the Kentucky Supreme Court issued an opinion on all this: “… there was a serious lack of candor with the trial court and there may have been deception, bad faith conduct, abuse of the judicial process or perhaps even fraud.”

After the Supreme Court remanded the case back to the state attorney general’s office, the whole matter dribbled away, and then resurfaced in a different form, in another venue. Finally, the original judgment in the case was allowed to stand. Lilly had won the battle.

It’s important to note that the violence-inducing effects of Prozac apply, as well, to the other SSRI antidepressants, such as Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox, and Lexapro.

After commenting on some of the adverse effects of the antidepressant drug Prozac, psychiatrist Peter Breggin notes, “From the initial studies, it was also apparent that a small percentage of Prozac patients became psychotic.”

Prozac, in fact, endured a rocky road in the press for a time. Stories on it rarely appear now. The major media have backed off. But on February 7th, 1991, Amy Marcus’ Wall Street Journal article on the drug carried the headline, “Murder Trials Introduce Prozac Defense.” She wrote, “A spate of murder trials in which defendants claim they became violent when they took the antidepressant Prozac are imposing new problems for the drug’s maker, Eli Lilly and Co.”

Also on February 7, 1991, the New York Times ran a Prozac piece headlined, “Suicidal Behavior Tied Again to Drug: Does Antidepressant Prompt Violence?”

In his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Breggin mentions that the Donahue show (Feb. 28, 1991) “put together a group of individuals who had become compulsively self-destructive and murderous after taking Prozac and the clamorous telephone and audience response confirmed the problem.”