Jersey City gunman linked to anti-Semitic hate group

A man and woman who engaged police in an hours-long gun battle at a Jersey City kosher grocery store before being killed had targeted the store, officials said Wednesday, and the man reportedly was linked to a hate group and had published anti-Semitic posts online before the attack.

Mayor Steven Fulop said Wednesday at a news conference that surveillance footage from the city's closed-circuit cameras and security cameras in the store made it clear "that these two individuals targeted the kosher grocery location" where they opened fire and sparked the gun battle with police on Tuesday afternoon.

The shootout lasted two hours before police killed the suspects at about 2:30 pm. The New York Times said officials had identified the two assailants as David N. Anderson, 47, and his girlfriend Francine Graham, 50.

Authorities also described the pair as prime suspects in the killing of Michael Rumberger, a 34-year-old Uber driver in nearby Bayonne, whose body was found Saturday in the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car.

Anderson, a four-year veteran of the Army reserve, had spent more than a year in jail after pleading guilty to a weapons charge from more than a decade ago, according to court records, The New York Times reported.

The newspaper said that Anderson was linked to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement and had published anti-Semitic posts online, according to an unnamed law enforcement official.

The Black Hebrew Israelites, which has no connection with mainstream Judaism, has been described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy group that tracks such movements, according to the Times.

Investigators had initially said the store was chosen at random and wasn't indicative of a hate crime.

The mayor and the city's public safety director, James Shea, didn't explicitly label the shooting an anti-Semitic attack and said they didn't know the specific motive.

Three bystanders who were inside the store when the shootout began were killed. They have been identified as Mindel Ferencz, 33, who ran the grocery store with her husband; Moshe Deutch, 24, a rabbinical student who lives in Brooklyn; and Miguel Douglas, 49, who was believed to have worked at the store.

One other person inside the store was wounded but managed to escape, according to police.

Asked if any of the civilians were accidentally shot by police, Jersey City Police Chief Michael Kelly said, "We think that this was all bad-guy fire."

The attack would have likely continued if two police officers hadn't been blocks away and responded immediately when they heard the first gunshots, officials said. The two officers first on scene were both injured in the shootout.

Law enforcement sources said Jersey City Police Detective Joseph Seals, 40, spotted a stolen U-Haul van linked to the killing in Bayonne this past weekend. Seals was on duty and in plainclothes Tuesday when he tried to question the van's two occupants at Bayview Cemetery. He was shot in the head by at least one of the suspects, police said. The married father of five was part of a department tasked to get guns off of the city's streets.

The two shooters, said to be dressed in black and armed with higher-powered rifles, then fled to the supermarket several blocks away, officials said.

"We could see the van move through Jersey City streets slowly," Fulop told reporters. "The perpetrators stopped in front of there, calmly opened the door with two long rifles and began firing from the street into the facility."

"We now know this did not begin with gunfire between police officers and perpetrators and then move to the store," Shea said. "It began in the store."

Investigators found a note with apparent religious writing inside the van the suspects drove to the market, NBC and the New York Post reported. Police also found a live pipe bomb inside the vehicle, according to the Times.

Media reports said that in recent years approximately 100 Chassidic families, priced out of Williamsburg and other Brooklyn, New York, neighborhoods, have settled in Jersey City.

The supermarket is next to a small synagogue in the Greenville neighborhood's growing Jewish community.

The families living there, many of whom belong to the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect, have created a budding community in the residential area with a historically black population.