New York City has recorded its first homicide of 2021 as one person was killed and two others were injured in a shooting at a Queens hotel just one hour after the ball dropped in Time's Square.
The triple shooting took place outside the Umbrella Hotel on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens just after 1 a.m. Friday following a dispute with a group of people that left a 20-year-old man dead.
Between midnight New Year's Eve and mid-morning on New Year's Day, at least seven people had already been shot across the city.
The deadly start to the new year comes after 2020 marked the bloodiest year since 2011 with at least 447 murders across the Big Apple.
New York City has recorded its first homicide of 2021 as one person was killed and two others were injured in a shooting at a Queens hotel just one hour after the ball dropped in Time's Square. Pictured the crime scene
The triple shooting took place outside the Umbrella Hotel on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens just after 1 a.m. Friday following a dispute with a group of people that left a 20-year-old man dead
NYPD officers responded to reports of a shooting outside the Umbrella Hotel at around 1:10 a.m. and found three people with gunshot wounds.
One victim, a 20-year-old man, had been shot in the body, and another 20-year-old male had been shot in the left leg, according to the NYPD.
The third victim, a 40-year-old man, had been shot in the torso, arms and legs.
The victims were rushed to Queens General Hospital where the younger male with the gunshot wound to the body was pronounced dead.
The NYPD said Friday morning that the other two victims are still in hospital in 'non-critical' conditions.
The victims have not been identified as authorities are working to notify the families of the victims first.
An NYPD spokesperson told DailyMail.com there had been a dispute between the victims and a group of people before the shooting.
It is not yet clear if the victims knew each other or whether they were staying at the hotel at the time, police said.
No arrests have been made and a motive for the shooting is not yet known. The investigation is ongoing.
The Umbrella Hotel has been the backdrop for at least two other shootings in recent months.
The deadly start to the new year comes after 2020 marked the bloodiest year since 2011 with at least 447 murders across the Big Apple
On July 3, a 15-year-old boy allegedly shot an 18-year-old as they both walked out of the hotel.
Then on August 9, a drive-by shooting left bullet holes in the hotel's doors.
Friday's three victims were among seven people shot in the city so far in 2021.
Just after midnight, a 33-year-old woman was shot while lying in her bed in Ozone Park.
The woman was in bed inside her home on Lincoln Avenue in the City Line section of Brooklyn when a stray bullet flew through the window at around 12:07 a.m. and hit her in the leg.
She was taken to Brookdale University Hospital in a stable condition.
Fears are mounting that the Big Apple could be in store for another crime-ridden year after murders and gun crime soared throughout 2020 as it grappled with the coronavirus pandemic.
The year marked the bloodiest year in nearly a decade for New Yorkers, with a staggering 447 murders recorded in 2020.
Investigators on the scene of the early morning shooting in Queens which marked the Big Apple's first murder of 2021
NYPD officers responded to reports of a shooting outside the Umbrella Hotel at around 1:10 a.m. and found three people with gunshot wounds
One victim, a 20-year-old male, had been shot in the body, and another 20-year-old male had been shot in the left leg, according to the NYPD. The third victim, a 40-year-old male, had been shot in the torso, arms and legs. The victims were rushed to Queens General Hospital where the younger male with the gunshot wound to the body was pronounced dead
The 447 currently tallied is the highest number since 2011 when 515 murders took place and a 41 per cent increase from 2019.
It also marks the third consecutive year of rising homicides after New York City recorded a modern-era low of 292 killings in 2017.
Shootings have also soared with 1,855 people shot in 2020 - more than double the 914 victims in 2019.
Overall shooting incidents have also surged 97.4 percent in a single year, up from 769 in 2019 to 1,518 in 2020.
The figures, from the NYPD's Compstat, cover the period from January 1 up to December 27, meaning they could rise higher still.
At least one incident not accounted for in the figures was the shooting death of a 26-year-old man in the Jamaica section of Queens Thursday night.
Sean Vance was sitting in a blue BMW sedan on Linden Blvd. just before 7:30 p.m. when a gunman shot him several times in the chest and fled.
Crime stats from the four weeks between November 30 - December 27 show violent crime is far higher than it was at the same time last year
One of the youngest victims of 2020's wave of shootings was 1-year-old baby Davell Gardner who was killed when gunfire rung out at a family gathering in Brooklyn on July 14.
Meanwhile, one of the last was a 24-year-old man who was shot just three minutes before the turn of the new year as he got into a car in Washington Heights.
The victim suffered a gunshot wound to his left arm and drove himself to Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Crime statistics from the four weeks between November 30 to December 27 also show violent crime is far higher than it was the same time last year, with 21 murders to 2019's 13 and 109 shootings compared to 49 the year before.
The spate of violence has sparked fears the Big Apple is headed back to the dark days of the 70s and 80s when crime and poverty was rife.
Tensions have been building between Bill de Blasio and the NYPD after the mayor cut $1 billion from the NYPD's $6 billion budget in June.
The cuts came as calls to ‘defund’ the police grew from Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the Memorial Day 'murder' of black man George Floyd in Minneapolis, when shocking footage circulated on social media of NYPD cops attacking protesters gathered to demand an end to police brutality and racism.
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio in February. Tensions have been building between the pair after the mayor cut $1 billion from the NYPD's $6 billion budget in June. Shea described 2020 as a 'dark period' Tuesday
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said Tuesday he was hopeful of a better 2021.
'We're definitely coming out of that dark period,' Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said at police headquarters Tuesday.
'The confluence of COVID into the protests into all of the debate about defunding the police - I can't imagine a darker period.'
New York remains far safer than in three decades ago in the early 1990s, when there were more than 2,000 killings each year.
It's also statistically far safer than many of the other big cities.
As the nation's largest city, with about 8.3million residents, New York City has a homicide rate of about 5.2 per 100,000.
By contrast, Los Angeles, which has 4 million residents, has a rate of about 8 per 100,000.
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