Empire State Building shooter held grudge against his victim

An accessories designer, who gunned down his former co-worker near the Empire State Building, had held a grudge against his victim for years and the two had filed police complaints against one another a year ago after getting into a scuffle in their office.

Jeffrey Johnson, 58, was shot dead by New York police officers stationed outside the popular tourist destination after he killed his former co-worker Steven Ercolino, 41, with a .45 calibre semiautomatic pistol yesterday.

Johnson had once told a former landlord Kathleen Walsh that he was a sharpshooter.

Authorities described Johnson as a “disgruntled” person who had been laid off from his job at 40-year-old apparel company Hazan Imports a year ago.

Neighbours and co-workers described the animosity that had existed between Johnson and Ercolino, saying the “two never got along,” a report in the New York Times said.

A co-worker said Johnson was a “very eccentric” person and a “meticulous artist” who used to arrive first to work in the morning and was the last one to leave.

Ercolino joined Hazan as a vice-president for sales in 2005, the same year that Johnson also joined the company.

However Johnson’s discomfort with Ercolino was soon on full display.

“As time goes by, you could walk down the hallway and see an elbow being thrown or a shoulder being shoved, or a comment,” a co-worker Irene Timan said.

She said Johnson would often “taunt Steve, push him.”

A few months after Johnson was laid off, he returned to his old office building in April last year.

Timan recalled that Ercolino had told her about an encounter the two had in the office elevator.

“Steve was leaving the elevator, Jeff was walking in, and Jeff elbowed him,” she recalled.

“Steve had finally had enough, so he grabbed Jeff by the throat, and said, ‘If you ever do anything like this again, I’m going to kill you.’”

Johnson had not seemed affected by the size of his rival, who was about 5 feet 10 inches tall and 220 pounds, six or seven inches taller than Johnson and twice his weight.

Ercolino filed a police report and found that Johnson too had filed a complaint against him.

Both told the police the other had threatened him.

According to the police, the artist blamed the salesman for not selling enough of the items he had designed.

Johnson, the son of a Japanese mother and an American father, spoke to his co-workers about having served in the military.

“He was in the Marines, or Special Forces,” a co-worker said. “He was in Vietnam.”

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