NYPD takes over GW Bridge fatal shooting investigation, new details revealed

And Francis Wang, joining us, you were following what's going on at the George Washington Bridge. And you got some new information just to sort of set the scene. A 46-year-old man shot Tuesday night as he drove toward New Jersey on the bridge's upper level. There was some question about what happened, who the shooter is. A lot of those are still open this morning, but you just talked to your sources. What are you learning this morning? Yeah, so law enforcement sources just telling us, actually, before we came on Newsroom Live at 10 o'clock, that they do believe at this point this was a road rage dispute we also got several developments throughout the morning at the beginning of our morning newscast Port Authority Police still was leading this investigation at some point before Good Day that lead actually transferred to NYPD which led us to believe that the shooting maybe have happened in Manhattan perhaps on the on-ramp heading to the bridge maybe the driver hadn't fully made his way onto the bridge over the Hudson. But Port Authority, they were the first ones to respond because as you can see from Sky 4 here, this video showing the car, the blue Volkswagen had at one point crashed into the median. So it started with reports of a single car crash. NYPD later telling us this morning, they also received 911 calls about a shooting. When officers got onto the bridge, they found a 46-year-old man. We learned more about his identity just this morning and you can see the traffic- Has he been identified yet? He has not. There are some reports floating around about potentially who may have worked for. We have reached out to his potential employer and are waiting to confirm. So just to kind of back up a little bit, this is seven or so last night. So that's still rush hour. There's a lot of people on the bridge, obviously, going back and forth between New York and New Jersey. At some point, possibly as this person is leaving Manhattan and coming onto the bridge, there is some kind of altercation. There is some kind of I mean, we would say it's road rage. And and then a shooting takes place. And the important distinction here is that it happened before he crossed into New Jersey, which then would make this an NYPD case. Is that sort of what we're thinking here? He fully got onto the bridge. So if you think about it, it makes sense if someone's driving onto the bridge, maybe on the on ramp, they don't really have enough time to respond when they've been shot. Maybe go to a hospital closer to the local street. So it makes sense that he made it about halfway through the bridge before his car crashed. And even on the video of the car, you see the rear passenger window was damaged by what appeared to be a bullet and shattered glass. And do we know, was it multiple shots fired, a single shot? What do we know about that? That we still don't know. And often, as you know, we know in covering shootings, right, there's ballistic markers and police are spending hours canvassing the scene for evidence. But this is a difficult situation because it's on the George Washington Bridge. It's on the upper levels. That's the level where commercial trucks are allowed to pass. So you saw the traffic impacts there. The roads were shut down for the upper levels, I should say. The lanes were shut down for about six hours before they fully reopened at 1 a.m. A very difficult situation for police even to put the pieces together of what happened. So the shooting happened at 7. Those lanes didn't reopen till closer to 1 o'clock in the morning for the upper level. And I think we have some video. I mean, there were thousands of people, obviously, who were affected by this, including rapper Cardi B, who posted a video here that we can see. We're not going to play the audio, but you can see some of the video of Cardi B. She's among the thousands of people who was stuck. She sort of makes this story here. She doesn't know what's happening. Certainly the seriousness of what eventually came to be known of what transpired. So she was one of all those people who were stuck in traffic. I mean, that was several hours that it took. And look, we've all been in a situation, right, where you're in your car and you're stuck in traffic. You don't know why you're not moving. You don't know how long you're gonna be stuck in traffic for. But yes, when the news was revealed that a man had been shot and killed, obviously the response was very tragic, very sad, because everyone was stuck in traffic for hours. Ultimately, they made it home that night. But a 46-year-old man who likely was leaving work that day, heading back to Jersey at the end of the evening commute, sadly did not. um and back to the developments this morning Dan you have to remember too police are still figuring out which agency should take the lead in terms of jurisdiction they're still piecing together evidence surveillance video i'm sure will be crucial there's a ton of cameras in that area when you were when you were there uh because you spent your whole morning out there did you see any cameras did you did you notice what did you see so there was a camera and once the sun came up you could really see it and it was a pretty large camera right on the 179th uh stoplight for drivers heading onto the bridge so i know that's going to be crucial okay in any sort of investigation here because this is going to be a situation where because people were moving cars how do we find the witnesses to speak to that we usually do in a shooting yeah because it happens on the bridge and yeah i mean for sure the witness part of it you you sort of need somebody to come forward because you could have been in traffic and you could have just you could have seen what happened and then sort of drove on your way and not really understand what the final result was back to the ongoing investigation early this morning police had been reporting port authority police that he had been shot in the head that's what we reported last night that's what we reported this morning and that's because we had gotten that information confirmed by police agencies but once the investigation was essentially handed off to NYPD they confirmed with us that he was actually shot in the back of his right shoulder so again a lot of those details still coming to light this is a very active investigation and still a developing story at this hour scary situation francis thank you very much. We appreciate it.