Two assailants who shot up a Jersey City, N.J., kosher grocery cased the shop for months in advance, made a bomb strong enough to injure and kill people up to five football fields away and researched other Jewish centers, reports the Wall Street Journal. The two shooters also shot out the back window of a vehicle driven by a Hasidic Jewish person in the area in early December, law-enforcement officials said for the first time.
Video footage shows that the assailants cased the store twice in the days leading up to their Dec. 10 attack that left four people dead. Police killed the assailants after an hours-long standoff where the shooters fired hundreds of rounds. “We now know they planned greater acts,” said U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito. New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said the attack coincided with a surge in bias incidents in the state, which he described as a “rising tide of hate and intolerance.” There were 944 bias incidents in New Jersey in 2019, a 65 percent jump from the previous year and the single largest year-over-year increase in the state’s history, Grewal said. Many of those involved anti-Semitic incidents. “These are more than troubling,” he said. “They are unacceptable.”