On Monday, a late-afternoon drive-by shooting severely injured a 20-year-old man, who was shot in the head outside state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie’s Gun Hill Road constituency office in the East Bronx. An oft-busy office teeming with staffers and constituents, Monday’s shooting was a sanguineous scene, marked off by police tape and the victim’s bloodstained baseball cap.
The speaker confirmed that he was in Albany at the time of the shooting, and on Tuesday, the longtime lawmaker called for stricter actions to address gun proliferation and violence. Heastie is currently in the thick of state budget talks — originally due April 1 but has since been extended three times by state lawmakers — with debates brewing over Gov. Kathy Hochul’s changes to the state’s bail law, a housing plan and other policy issues the governor had included in her budget proposal.
