A man in a UPS uniform was fatally shot in the Walmart parking lot early Thursday morning by a man who then ran over the victim in his truck and peeled out, according to a witness.
“A guy was sitting in his truck, and all I heard was a gunshot and looked up, saw the guy fall, and then the guy in the truck backed up, pulled out, ran him over and took off,” John Thorna, of Newfield, told The Sun.
Bangs medics performed CPR on the victim shortly after 1 a.m., before Ithaca Police officers covered him in a white sheet and began taking pictures of the crime scene.
Thorna, who police identified as a witness, said he was standing by his sedan’s trunk, scratching the seal off of a phone card in the Walmart parking lot near Route 13 when he heard a single gunshot. Moments before, Thorna said, the victim had been behind him in the checkout line.
The victim, who Thorna said was white and appeared to be in his mid-40s, was wearing a UPS uniform. Thorna said he didn’t hear any argument and only looked up when he heard the gunshot and saw the man fall, about 200 feet from Walmart.
The victim was “walking out of the store and the other guy seemed like he was in the truck waiting for him,” Thorna said.
A Walmart employee said the store has surveillance cameras that cover the area of the alleged shooting and that managers were in the process of reviewing the tapes.
“I’ve worked here 11 years and I’ve never seen anything like that,” the employee said of the crime scene.
After a five hour standoff at a Tompkins residence, when the suspect fired shots at police officers, the alleged perpetrator was apprehended this morning and is now in custody. Police used a robot to communicate with the suspect during the standoff, according to Ithaca Police Chief John Barber. Barber called this incident a “senseless loss of life.”