An assailant involved in a prolonged firefight in Jersey City, N.J., that left six people dead, including one police officer, had published anti-Semitic and anti-police posts online and investigators believe the attack was motivated by those sentiments, a law enforcement official familiar with the case said on Wednesday [December 11, 2019].
The official said the names of the two suspects were David Anderson and Francine Graham. Mr. Anderson appeared to have a connection to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy group that tracks such movements.
The extent of Mr. Anderson’s involvement in that group remains unclear, the official said. The Black Hebrew Israelites have no connection with mainstream Judaism.
Investigators also found a manifesto-style note inside the assailants’ van, the law enforcement official and another official familiar with the case said.
The document, which was described as brief and “rambling,” suggested no clear motive for the shooting. Investigators also found a live pipe bomb inside the vehicle, the law enforcement official said.
The law enforcement official could not provide more details about the suspect’s online posts or where they had been published. He said investigators were still reviewing that information.
So far, the authorities have not identified the attackers, who were killed in the firefight. None of the three victims inside the store have been publicly named by officials, but multiple people connected to the Jewish community in Jersey City have identified two of them as Mindel Ferencz, 33, the wife of the market owner, and Moshe Deutch, a 24-year-old rabbinical student who lives in Brooklyn.
…Jersey City’s mayor, Steven Fulop, said that surveillance footage indicated the two attackers had targeted a kosher supermarket where most of the carnage unfolded.
Mr. Fulop said on Wednesday that the footage revealed that after the assailants shot Detective Seals in an earlier encounter, they drove slowly and deliberately to the market, roughly a mile away.
“The perpetrators stopped in front of there and calmly opened the door with two long rifles,” he said.
Both Mr. Fulop and Jersey City’s public safety director, James Shea, said that after the attackers left the van, they walked past others on the street and aimed at people inside the kosher supermarket.
….Detective Seals approached the two assailants, a man and a woman, who were inside a U-Haul van at a cemetery near the kosher market because the van had been linked to a homicide over the weekend, according to the law enforcement official. The official did not have any more details on the homicide.
…For much of at least the next hour, residents nearby — and blocks away — could hear rapid bursts of gunfire coming from the area around the market. Investigators later found a live pipe bomb inside the van, the official said.
Hasidic community leaders on Wednesday morning identified the two members of their community who were killed inside the kosher market.
Ms. Ferencz, the market owner’s wife, was working at the store at the time of the attack.
About five years ago, she and her husband were among the first Hasidic Jews to relocate to Jersey City from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The couple had three children, said Rabbi Mordechai Feuerwerker, a leader in the Jersey City Hasidic community.
“I’ve cried my eyes out already. I’m feeling pretty broken,” said the victim’s mother-in-law, Victoria Ferencz, 72, who heard the news on Wednesday morning from Jewish media. “I feel sorry for my son. She’s going to heaven, but he and his children will have it hard.”
…Another victim was Mr. Deutsch, the 24-year-old rabbinical student.
In Manhattan, at a news conference at City Hall, Rabbi David Niederman, the executive director and president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, said that Mr. Deutsch helped lead a food drive this year during the Jewish holidays and helped to feed 2,000 people.
Mr. Deutsch’s father, Abe Deutsch, is a board member of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, a large community service organization in the Satmar Hasidic community.
Rabbi Niederman said he knew Moshe Deutsch personally, describing him as “extremely kind and generous” and a “go-to person when his peers needed help.”
As he spoke about the young shooting victim, the rabbi choked up.
“Can you imagine a few hundred bullets went into the body of a 24-year-old child?” Rabbi Niederman said. “How can we as a people, a community, bear that?”…
