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.
