A doctor disguised as one who would save lives came to the New York hospital that had spurned him only to try to destroy them instead, replacing his stethoscope and scalpel with an automatic weapon, authorities said.
Henry Bello triggered a Code Silver at Bronx Lebanon Hospital, sending his one-time colleagues diving for cover on the hospital’s two top floors while he repeatedly pulled his trigger, killing a doctor who was covering someone else’s shift as a favor, and injuring six others, including a patient.
Details of Bello’s rampage emerged on Saturday along with an e-mail rant against colleagues he blamed for forcing him to resign from the hospital amid sexual harassment allegations two years earlier.
The e-mail was sent to the New York Daily News just two hours before the shooting on Friday afternoon that left six other people wounded and Bello dead from a self-inflicted shot.
“This hospital terminated my road to a licensure to practice medicine,” the e-mail said. “First, I was told it was because I always kept to myself. Then it was because of an altercation with a nurse.”
He also blamed a doctor for blocking his chances at practicing medicine.
Bello had warned his former colleagues when he was forced out in 2015 that he would return someday to kill them.
A law enforcement official said that Bello arrived at the hospital with the assault rifle hidden under his lab coat and asked for a specific doctor whom he blamed for his having to resign, but the physician was not there.
The official spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation.
It was not clear if Bello knew Tracy Sin-Yee Tam, 32, who was killed in the shooting on the 16th and 17th floors of the hospital and was, like him, a family medicine doctor.
Hospital officials said that Tam normally worked in one of the hospital’s satellite clinics and was covering a shift in the main hospital as a favor to someone else.
Judy Beckles-Ross, 46, said she is not surprised that Tam volunteered to cover the shift.
“She never said no,” said Beckles-Ross, a friend from medical school who knew her for 11 years. “She had a good heart. Anybody that needed help, she would help them.”
The six others who were injured — a patient, two medical students and three physicians — largely suffered gunshot wounds to the head, chest and abdomen.
One physician remained in critical condition and the rest were stable, officials said on Saturday.
Hospital vice president Errol Schneer said his staff responded heroically.
“Many of our staff risked their own lives to save patients,” Schneer told reporters at the hospital.
Adding to the chaos was a fire alarm that went off when Bello attempted to set himself ablaze, the flames extinguished by sprinklers, shortly before he shot himself, authorities said.
His former coworkers described a man who was aggressive, loud and threatening.
“All the time he was a problem,” said David Lazala, a physician who trained Bello as a family medicine doctor.
When Bello was forced out in 2015, he sent Lazala an e-mail blaming him for the dismissal.
“He promised to come back and kill us then,” another doctor, Maureen Kwankam, told the New York Daily News
According to New York State Education Department records, Bello graduated from Ross University and had a permit to practice as an international medical graduate that was issued on July 1, 2014, and expired last year on the same day.
In 2004, he pleaded guilty to unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor, after a 23-year-old woman told police that Bello grabbed her.
He was arrested again in 2009 on a charge of unlawful surveillance after two different women reported he was trying to look up their skirts with a mirror. That case was eventually sealed.
Schneer told the New York Times that the hospital did not know about Bello’s criminal history when he was hired.
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