Murder-Suicide at the Manhattan Federal Building

The Daily Beast

The shooting was at a federal building in downtown Manhattan that houses the immigration court and processing center.

Anybody who has been listening to Donald Trump rant about a supposed illegal alien crime wave might have imagined that the gunman who inexplicably drew one of two .38 caliber revolvers he was carrying in a plastic bag and fatally wounded a security guard on Friday was a homicidal foreigner.

But after the gunman had stepped beyond the dying guard and passed through the metal detector and fatally shot himself, a search of his wallet showed that he was 68-year-old retired U.S. Army Reserves officer and onetime government employee named Kevin Downing from a place no more distant than just across the Hudson River in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He had briefly worked as an economist with the U.S. Department of Labor, which has offices in the building. He had been let go before he completed the one year trial period and he had unsuccessfully sued to be reinstated, charging he had been fired for being a whistleblower who reported “a gross waste of funds.” The hearing board found he had “not revealed anything not widely known” and had “failed to make a non-frivolous allegation.”

Detectives noted that Downing had opened fire without exchanging so much as a word with the ill-fated guard. The guard, 53-year-old Idrissa Camara, had been due to go off duty at 4 pm, but he had agreed to work an extended shift when he could have gone home to his wife and children. He was a native of the Ivory Coast, which means in this case the immigrant was the victim. He had died simply because he had the terrible luck to be there at 5:05 PM when Downing appeared with his two handguns.