Halloween turned truly terrifying for students and parents Tuesday when a driver went on a deadly rampage in front of several lower Manhattan schools — right as the afternoon bell rang.
Kids ran screaming down the sidewalk after the killer plowed his van into pedestrians and then emerged waving guns and shouting “Allahu Akbar.”“Two women and a group of children — maybe 10 children — they’re running towards me. I hear one girls screaming, ‘Someone has a gun!'” said witness John Williams.
Frantic parents feared the worst as they waited to pick youngsters up from Independence Primary School.
“They won’t let me through I don’t know what to do,” said Marissa Davis, 47, who was trying to cross the West Street to get to her 9 and 12-year old sons.
“This is crazy, I’ve never seen anything like this before! I just want to get to my children I don’t even care what happened I need to know they’re OK,” she said adding: “we’re supposed to go pumpkin carving later.”
Local Roberto Crivello, 54, was just happy knowing his 7 year old daughter was safe inside.
“I was here through 9/11, this is something else,” he said.
Students from Stuyvesant High School and Borough of Manhattan Community College made it out of class in time to witness the carnage — bodies laying lifeless in the bike lane and victims were trapped inside a mangled school bus.
“I came out of school and heard 5 or 6 gun shots. Teenagers were running and laughing — they thought it wasn’t serious. Then a girl said, ‘No, this is serious, he really has a gun,'” said Bronx resident Giselle Rivera, 20.“I saw one man laying on the ground, it looked like he had been shot,” added student John Williams, 22, of Brooklyn.
Many students said they only heard the gun shots, but student Ali Ithazad, 20, said he also witnessed the truck ramming into the bus.
“I saw one car accident. You know those Home Depot trucks? Like that. I was quite nervous, I thought there was a shooting. I heard again six or seven, I don’t know what happened,” said the Brooklynite.