A portrait of an angry doctor seeking revenge on the medical professionals he believed turned their backs on him emerged on Saturday, as a New York hospital began to recover from a shooting that left one doctor dead, another critically injured and four staff members and a patient wounded.
Dr Henry Bello aired his complaints against his former workplace in an email purportedly sent to the New York Daily News about two hours before he returned to Bronx Lebanon hospital on Friday and pulled an AM-15 assault rifle from under his white lab coat.
Bello, who killed himself, had warned former colleagues two years ago that he would return someday to kill them after he was forced to resign amid sexual harassment allegations.
“This hospital terminated my road to a licensure to practice medicine,” the email 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.
A law enforcement official said that when Bello arrived at the hospital he asked for a specific doctor whom he blamed for his having to resign. The physician wasn’t there at the time. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
It was not clear if Bello knew Dr Tracy Sin-Yee Tam, 32, who was killed in the shooting and was, like him, a family medicine doctor. Hospital officials said on Saturday 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.
The victims largely suffered gunshot wounds to the head, chest and abdomen. Another physician remained in critical condition. One of the injured was a patient, two are medical students and the rest are doctors. All but one was in stable condition on Saturday.
Hospital vice-president Errol C Schneer said his staff responded heroically.
“Many of our staff risked their own lives to save patients,” Schneer told reporters at the hospital where the 16th and 17th floors remained closed and staffers were still recovering from the shooting that sent people diving for cover and huddling in patients’ rooms while the gunman was on the loose.
Adding to the chaos, authorities said, was a fire alarm that went off when Bello attempted to set himself ablaze, the flames being extinguished by sprinklers shortly before he shot himself.
Detectives searched the Bronx home where Bello was most recently living and found the box for the gun. Investigators were checking serial numbers and trying to determine where it was purchased.
Bello’s former co-workers described a man who was aggressive, loud and threatening.
“All the time he was a problem,” said Dr David Lazala, who trained Bello. When Bello was forced out in 2015, he sent Lazala an email blaming him for the dismissal.
Dr Maureen Kwankam told the Daily News that “he promised to come back and kill us then”.
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 1 July 2014 and expired last year on the same day.
Bello also worked as a pharmacy technician at Metropolitan hospital in Manhattan because he was having a hard time getting licensed as a physician, but quit the job in 2012 and filed for unemployment, according to the lawyer who represented him on appeal in 2014. He lost his case. One former colleague at Metropolitan said he would frequently argue with nurses and bristled at being told what to do, but his attorney in the unemployment action said that was not the man he knew.
“I’m absolutely shocked,” attorney David Wim said. “He was such a nice gentleman. He was very humble, very polite, very respectful.”
Wim said he even jokingly suggested to his assistant that she date the doctor, who was unmarried.
In 2004, the doctor pleaded guilty to unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor, after a 23-year-old woman told police Bello grabbed her. He was arrested again in 2009 on a charge of unlawful surveillance, after two women reported he was trying to look up their skirts with a mirror. That case was eventually sealed.
Schneer told the New York Times the hospital did not know about Bello’s criminal history when he was hired.
“At that time, and as a result of a human resources and security department background check, which includes fingerprinting, there was no record of any conviction for sexual abuse,” he said.
