A 31-year-old Indian-origin man was shot dead in Queens here as he sat in a borrowed SUV parked down the street from his home, days after an Indian national was killed after sustaining an apparent gunshot wound to his head in the US state of Maryland.
Satnam Singh was sitting behind the wheel of a black Jeep Wrangler Sahara that was parked in South Ozone Park when a gunman approached and started shooting at him around 3:45 pm on Saturday, a report in The New York Daily News said.
Police said Singh lived just down the street from where he was shot.
Singh was struck in the chest and neck and was rushed to a local hospital, where he died later, according to police.
It appears that Singh had borrowed the car from a friend a short time earlier and needed it to pick someone up, police said.
Detectives were trying to “determine if the gunman was aiming at Singh or was hoping to kill the SUV’s owner and was unaware who was inside,” the report said, adding that no arrests have been made so far in the case.
The report said that according to the police, the gunman approached Singh on foot but neighbours say the “shots came from a silver-coloured sedan with a black trunk as it passed the Jeep.
“(Singh) was walking up 129th St. going to the car and the other car with the perp in it came up,” said neighbour Joan Cappellani.
“(It) made a U-turn, came back and then ‘Pow! Pow! Pow!’ and then went down 129th St.”
The incident was caught on Cappellani’s home security cameras and the New York Police Department personnel are reviewing the footage for evidence.
“It was just another crazy day in South Ozone Park,” she said.
“He was very kind and quiet,” neighbour Christina Persaud said in the New York Daily News report. “I said ‘Hi’ to him every day when I saw him. Maybe he was targeted, but I don’t know.”
This comes days after Indian national Sai Charan from Telangana was found injured with an apparent gunshot wound inside his SUV in Baltimore, Maryland.
The 25-year-old was immediately rushed to a trauma centre, where he was pronounced dead on June 19.
