Moshe Deutsch and Leah Mindel Ferencz identified as Jersey City shooting victims. I’d of third civilian unnamed as authorities say Kosher grocery store specifically targeted.
Three of the victims in the Jersey City shootout were identified Wednesday as a grocery store owner and customer — both Brooklyn natives — as well as a shop employee, community sources and officials said.
Leah Mindel Ferencz, 33, who co-owned the Jersey City Kosher Supermarket in the Greenville neighborhood with her husband, and Moshe Deutsch, 24, a customer at the deli, were fatally shot there Tuesday by suspects using long guns, sources said. A third victim, a store delivery worker, was also shot to death but has not yet been identified.
Ferencz, a mother of three children ages 11, 7 and 4, and Deutsch, the son of Brooklyn civic leader Abe Deutsch, both lived in Williamsburg before they moved to Jersey City, officials and family members said.
‘She was very special and very loyal,’ Meyer Ferencz, Leah’s brother-in-law, said at the family’s Brooklyn home Wednesday according to chabad.org.
Meyer said Leah and her husband, Moshe Ferencz, moved from Brooklyn three years ago and bought the store.
‘It was a real tough mission there they undertook when they moved over there to Jersey City,’ Meyer said. ‘It’s very tragic to see what happened after so much effort and hustling. It’s very painful.’
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Victims remembered:
Rabbi Moshe Shapiro who runs the New Jersey synagogue Chabad Lubavitch of Hoboken, said he often frequents the deli at 223 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and knew the victims.
Shapiro said he was with Moshe Ferencz on Tuesday night at the local police station house when Ferencz received word that his wife and the mother of his children had been killed.
Shapiro said Leah typically worked behind the register at the deli.
‘She was very sweet and very gentle,’ said Shapiro.
Shapiro said a cousin of Deutsch, whom he identified as Chaim Deutsch, was inside the deli Tuesday afternoon with his relative at the time of the shooting and suffered graze wounds.
‘He came with his cousin from Brooklyn and they were in the store,’ said Shapiro, who visited Chaim in the hospital Tuesday night. ‘And he said suddenly he heard and felt gunshots. He did not see the gunmen. He saw his cousin fall to the floor, and he ran out the back door. He eventually climbed over a few backyards to escape.’
Shapiro said the bullets that wounded Chaim ‘did not penetrate beyond the skin.’
Police shot and killed the shooters, who were identified as David Anderson and Francine Graham, ending the hours-long incident that rocked the Jersey City area.
The chaotic incident also claimed the life of Jersey City Detective Joseph Seals, a married father of five.
Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop said Wednesday that the shooters were captured on CCTV footage ‘slowly’ rolling up to the supermarket in a van before they stopped in front, ‘calmly opened the door with two long rifles’ and ‘began firing from the street’ into the store.
A pair of officers on foot patrol nearby responded to the gunfire, prompting the shooters to retreat into the store, where most of the carnage took place, officials said.
Two Hasidic organizations were at the scene of the shooting Wednesday to collect any fragments of human remains that they could bury with the victims, as per Jewish law.
New York officials, including de Blasio, have condemned the attack as ‘anti-Semitic.’
