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It began with people leaving two separate New Year’s Eve parties — one on Liberty Road, the other on Belmont Street — around 4 a.m.
Police responding to reports of “a rapid succession of shots” found a severely drunken 21-year-old Fair Lawn man who’d been assaulted, Police Chief Arthur O’Keefe told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
He refused to cooperate with police, however, and was taken to Englewood Medical Center with injuries the chief described as not life-threatening.
Officers located a dozen spent shell casings from a large caliber semi-automatic weapon in the area, O’Keefe said.
“There were no immediate signs that anyone had been shot,” he said.
“Its’ not unusual for us to get gunshot calls on New Year’s Eve,” O’Keefe said.
However, he added: “It’s a very serious situation when you have twelve shots fired in a dense, residential area. Even if this was a case where someone fired a whole clip into the air as a New Year’s celebration, people don’t realize these bullets can kill someone on the way down.”
His detectives are “following up on a number of leads” in that case and at least two others that happened overnight and into the morning, the chief told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Just before 6 a.m., a 32-year-old Englewood man was jumped from behind, beaten and robbed of his cellphone in the area of Tenafly Road and Charles Street, Detective Lt. Tim Torell said.
At least least eight males attacked him, said the victim, who was taken to the hospital in Englewood.
“We’ll be looking to see if there are any gang connections here or if it was just a crime of opportunity, possibly fueled by alcohol and/or drug involvement,” O’Keefe said.
The most serious incident, Torell said, occurred around 7:15 this morning, when a 35-year-old city man turned up in the emergency room of Englewood Medical Center with six stab wounds.
The victim told police he was at a New Year’s Eve party in Teaneck earlier and left because of a disturbance that broke out there.
He was near his apartment in the Rock Creek Housing Development, he said, when several males from the Teaneck party attacked him before fleeing, Torell said.
O’Keefe said the victim “victim sustained some significant injuries but is expected to survive.”
The chief noted that city police are working the case together with their counterparts in Teaneck.
Anyone with information about the crimes is asked to call Englewood police: (201) 568-2711
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