A lawyer for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is in critical condition after he was shot in the head in Brooklyn last night, while celebrating this weekend’s annual West Indian Day Parade with his family.
Carey Gabay, 43, the first deputy general counsel at the Empire State Development Corporation and a former assistant counsel to the governor, was celebrating J’ouvert—a pre-dawn kick-off of the Carnival season—with his family when he was hit with a “random bullet,” Mr. Cuomo said.
“It is so painful, so unnecessary, so sad,” Mr. Cuomo said before today’s parade, according to audio provided by his office. “I don’t know what it’s going to take this nation to come to its senses with gun violence. It’s the same story almost weekly.”
Mr. Gabay was shot at 3:41 a.m. in Crown Heights, police told the Wall Street Journal, and was taken to Kings County Hospital where sources told the paper he was likely to die. This morning, Mr. Cuomo said Mr. Gabay was “not doing well.”
“His wife is pregnant with their first child. He went to Harvard University. He is the American dream—he grew up in public housing in the Bronx, went to Harvard, he could have been at any law firm he wanted to, making multiples of what we paid him,” Mr. Cuomo said. “He worked for the state because he wanted to give back.”
It was one of several incidents of violence overnight in the vicinity of the parade celebrations. A 24-year-old man died after being stabbed in the torso, and a 21-year-old man is in stable condition after being shot in the buttocks. The West Indian Day Parade and the celebrations surrounding it have long been associated with violence, but Mr. Cuomo today there is gun violence all around the country, and that the shooting was a personal reminder of the need for strong gun control regulations. He said he was proud of New York’s Safe Act, but that guns enter the state from others with more lax regulations.
“Anybody who doesn’t believe we need to do something about gun control is delusional—we can protect the second amendment and legitimate gun owners, but we also need to protect people,” Mr. Cuomo said. “How many young innocent people have to die before this nation comes to its senses? And this is a terrible, terrible, painful loss and all unnecessary.”
The governor visited with Mr. Gabay’s family this morning and recalled their “tears and frustration.”
“It is personal to me because I know this young man, so beautiful, so giving, so kind—so unnecessary, really so unnecessary,” he said. “I was just with the family and the tears and the frustration—and I’m governor of the State of New York and there’s nothing I can say and there’s nothing I can do. And sometimes it just hurts.”
