(Updated on July 1)
A doctor angry that his career was derailed at a New York City hospital toted an assault rifle past security in search of a colleague he was going to hold responsible. When that person wasn't there, he opened fire anyway, killing a doctor who was only there covering a shift as a favor, authorities said Saturday.
The shooting started at 2:50 p.m. Friday inside the Bronx Lebanon Hospital, drawing a heavy police presence to the area as officers with guns drawn told people to hide. Hospital employees barricaded themselves in rooms to escape the violence.
''I thought I was going to die,'' said Renaldo Del Villar, a 55-year-old patient who was in the third-floor emergency room getting treatment for a lower back injury.
He said an alarm went off, and police said there was an active shooter in the hospital. Someone on the loudspeaker also announced a ''Code Silver.''
''I asked them, 'Are we safe here?'' Del Villar said. ''When there's a shooter and you don't know where the shooter is, you don't know what's going to happen.''
Police officers went floor by floor looking for the gunman and reported just before 4 p.m. that he was dead inside the building. A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that the gunman killed himself. He had opened fire on the 16th and 17th floors, police said.
The new details of Dr. Henry Bello's rampage emerged along with an email rant against colleagues he blamed for forcing him to resign from Bronx Lebanon Hospital amid sexual harassment allegations two years earlier. The email was sent to the New York Daily News just two hours before the shooting Friday afternoon that left six other people wounded and Bello dead from a self-inflicted shot.
"This hospital terminated my road to a licensure to practice medicine," the email said. "First, I was told it was because I always kept to myself. Then it was because of an altercation with a nurse."
He also blamed a doctor for blocking his chances at practicing medicine.
Bello had warned his former colleagues when he was forced out in 2015 that he would return someday to kill them.
A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that Bello arrived at the hospital with the assault rifle hidden under his lab coat and asked for a specific doctor whom he blamed for his having to resign, but the physician wasn't there at the time. The official spoke on anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation.
It was not clear if Bello knew Dr. Tracy Sin-Yee Tam, 32, who was killed in the shooting on the 16th and 17th floors of the hospital and was, like him, a family medicine doctor. Hospital officials said that Tam normally worked in one of the hospital's satellite clinics and was covering a shift in the main hospital as a favor to someone else.
"It makes you think that anything can happen to anybody," said Tam's neighbor, Alena Khaim, 23, who saw Tam's sister outside the home overcome with grief, shaking and unable to walk. "She was such a sweet girl. You would never think something like that would happen but it happened."
The six others who were injured — a patient, two medical students and three physicians — largely suffered gunshot wounds to the head, chest and abdomen. One physician remained in critical condition and the rest were stable, officials said Saturday.
Hospital vice president Errol C. Schneer said his staff responded heroically.
"Many of our staff risked their own lives to save patients," Schneer told reporters at the hospital where the 16th and 17th floors remained closed, and staffers were still recovering from the rampage that sent people diving for cover and huddling in patients' rooms while the gunman was on the loose. Adding to the chaos, authorities said, was a fire alarm that went off when Bello attempted to set himself ablaze, the flames extinguished by sprinklers, shortly before he shot himself.
The 120-year-old hospital has nearly 1,000 beds and one of the busiest emergency rooms in New York City. It is about a mile and a half north of Yankee Stadium.
In 2011, two people were shot at Bronx Lebanon in what police said was a gang-related attack.
