The terrorist attack that struck Lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon was witnessed at close range by a female employee of Manhattan Youth who has asked that her name not be published. This woman was walking from Pier 25, along the Hudson River (near Harrison Street) toward the Downtown Community Center, on Warren Street (near West Street) shortly after 3:00 pm, carrying candy that would later be given to children trick-or-treating at the Community Center. (Both Pier 25 and the Downtown Community Center are operated by Manhattan Youth.)
Moments after she had crossed Chambers Street, near the P.S. 89 school yard, the woman heard a loud crash behind her, “like a truck hitting metal plates in the road, but it lasted longer,” she recalls. When she turned around, she saw a Home Depot flatbed pickup truck in the middle of Chambers Street, just off of West Street, beneath the pedestrian bridge that leads to Stuyvesant High School. The truck, which had extensive damage to its front end, “was blocking the path,” she remembers, with the vehicle turned perpendicular to the jogging and bicycle lane that runs parallel to West Street, its front pointing eastward and its back end pointing toward the Hudson River. “There was a lot of dust and my first thought was that this was a horrible accident,” she recalls.
The noise of the collision seems to have come from the Home Depot truck, which had been speeding along the bike path, first hitting a low concrete median that contained landscaping and plants, which scattered soil and fallen lamp posts across the intersection. A fraction of a second later, as the Home Depot truck left the bike path and strayed into Chambers Street, it slammed into a small school bus, which was making a right turn from West Street, onto Chambers Street. (As he approached the intersection, the driver of this school bus likely never saw the Home Depot truck, moving at high speed along a path in which vehicles are prohibited.) After the collision, the bus completed the turn onto Chambers Street, then limped along for a few additional yards, before coming to rest on Chambers, between West Street and North End Avenue. By this time, the Home Depot truck was stopped dead in the middle of Chambers Street, just off of West Street.
Turning back toward the sound, “I could see through the passenger-side window, that the driver was leaning forward,” the woman remembers. “And at first, I thought that he was slumped against the steering wheel.” She began to approach the vehicle, intending to help. “That’s when I saw through the window that he was moving, and reaching for something underneath him,” she notes.
The woman then saw the driver exit the truck, and walk around its left side, toward the back of the vehicle. Because the rear of the truck is lower than its front end, she could at this point see upper half of the driver’s body. “He had a gun in his right hand,” she recalls, “and something cylindrical and metal in his left hand. And then I thought, this was not an accident, and he is steps away from the school yard at P.S. 89,” which was packed with children minutes after the 3:00 pm dismissal. “If he had begun firing randomly at that moment,” she reflects, “he could easily have shot more than dozen children in the P.S. 89 yard, or many other people walking on the street outside the school gate.”
The flatbed pickup truck that Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov allegedly rented at Home Depot and drove down the Hudson River Park bike path at high speed, before coming to a stop at Chambers Street, as a result hitting a concrete median and colliding with a school bus.
“I turned and began yelling that there was a man with a gun,” she says, “and the people who were a few steps farther away than I was, turned and started running in the opposite direction.” She additionally recognized the imminent danger to the Manhattan Youth Community Center (where more than 100 children were attending after-school programs), at the next corner, and resolved to alert the staff there. “Before I turned, I saw him raise both hands in the air, and I could see his lips moving, although I couldn’t hear what he said,” she adds.
Video shot from the Chambers Street pedestrian bridge by Tawhid Kabir Xisan, a student at the nearby Borough of Manhattan Community College, shows the driver of the Home Depot truck sprinting from the wrecked vehicle, bobbing and weaving through afternoon traffic on West Street, with what appears to be a gun in each hand.
The female witness continues, “I ran to Warren Street, and turned left. As I did, I heard a sound behind me that must have been a gun shot.” This appears to have been the discharge from the weapon of a New York City police officer, who had been on foot patrol nearby and arrived at the scene seconds after the truck crashed, only to be confronted by a man waving two guns. Police later determined that the gun in the driver’s right hand, and the cylindrical object in his left hand were both pistols powered by compressed air. Such weapons are generally used for recreational purposes, but closely resemble actual firearms and are potentially lethal. This shot from the police officer felled the driver of the Home Depot truck, who dropped to the pavement in the southbound lanes of West Street, between Chambers and Warren Streets, a few yards from the fence that surrounds the P.S. 89 school yard.
“When I got to the front door of the Community Center,” she says, “I told the staff to lock the facility down.” Manhattan Youth has a protocol for securing the Community Center and all of the local schools where it manages after-school programs. Within seconds, the front door of the Community Center was bolted, and everybody inside had been moved away from the large, glass windows that form the facility’s Warren Street facade, toward the sheltered interior of the building, with children being moved off the main floor, to windowless rooms below ground level. Minutes later, Manhattan Youth staff had alerted School Safety officers at P.S. 89/I.S. 289 (at Warren and West Streets), P.S. 234 (at Greenwich and Warren Streets), P.S. 150 (on Greenwich Street, near Jay Street), P.S./I.S. 276 (on Battery Place), and the Lower Manhattan Middle School (on Broadway). All of these facilities were soon barricaded, so that children could not leave, and nobody from the outside could enter.
The New York Police Department also quickly sent word to School Safety officers at other nearby schools, and facilities as far away as Millennium High School (in the Financial District) were similarly secured by 3:30 pm. (Later, once police indicated that the danger had passed, all students from each of these schools were dismissed without incident.) The Battery Park City Authority, acting through its Allied Universal security force, also emptied the nearby ball fields on North End Avenue (between Warren and Murray Streets), which face West Street.
After being shot by the police officer, the driver of the rented Home Depot truck (tentatively identified as Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov) was handcuffed, arrested, and taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital. Police later alleged that Mr. Saipov killed at least eight people, and injured as many as 11 more, while careening down the Hudson River Park bike path (which he entered at Houston Street), slamming into pedestrians and bicyclists.
In the hour following the attack, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as Port Authority Police and New York State Police troopers, joined the New York Police Department, in responding en masse to the location of the incident. By 4:00 pm, more than 150 law enforcement personnel were on the scene, and traffic on West Street was halted for several blocks north and south of Chambers Street.
The assembled local and federal law enforcement personnel set up a makeshift command post in the Palm Restaurant, at the corner of Warren and West Streets, where they spent several hours interviewing more than a dozen witnesses. Around 5:00 pm, an FBI agent entered a room containing several witnesses and asked, who (if any) had heard the driver of the truck utter the phrase, “Allahu Akbar,” the Arabic phrase for “God is great.” Two of these witnesses raised their hands.
When police and FBI agents were finished taking statements from the woman who works for Manhattan Youth, one of them remarked on her quick thinking and determination to take action, as well as her attention to detail and precise recall, saying to her step-father, “she is a super hero.” Another officer paid the woman what is perhaps the highest compliment in the police lexicon, turning to her and saying, “you really ought to be a cop.”