Three dead, nine injured in New York City club mass shooting

Three people are dead and nine others injured after multiple gunmen opened fire in a New York City club early on Sunday morning.

The mass shooting occurred at Taste of the City Lounge in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Crown Heights just before 3.30am local time (5.30pm AEST) following a dispute inside the venue, according to police.

Investigators believe up to four shooters opened fire with multiple weapons. They found at least 42 shell casings from 9mm and .45-caliber weapons and a firearm in a nearby street.

New York Police Department commissioner Jessica Tisch said the violence appeared to be gang-related, calling the killings “a tragic, senseless act of violence”.

She told a press conference that officers arrived at the Franklin Avenue venue within minutes of multiple emergency calls being made, finding “numerous gunshot victims” aged between 19 and 61 inside.

A 19-year-old man died at the scene and two other men – ages 35 and 27 – died after being transported to a hospital. The wounded were being treated at hospitals for non-life-threatening injuries, Tisch said.

She said the gunmen remained on the loose and detectives were canvassing CCTV footage from various areas, adding officers were investigating whether the firearm found nearby was linked to the shooting.

It’s the second mass shooting within weeks in New York City, in a year that has otherwise seen declining gun violence.

On July 29, a man stalked through a Manhattan office tower with a rifle, wounding one person and killing four others. A New York City police officer was among those who died.

Mayor Eric Adams said both recent shootings just reinforce “why we do this work of going after guns off our streets.”

“This is the second within weeks, and we don’t want this to turn into a normal course of doing business of violence in our city,” he said.

“If you were inside the club, if you heard individuals talking about this shooting, if you witnessed someone fleeing the location, every piece of information will allow us to put the puzzle together.”

Tisch said the violence erupted even as the city has reported the lowest number of shootings and shooting victims on record during the first seven months of 2025.

“Something like this is, of course, thank God, an anomaly and it’s a terrible thing that happened this morning, but we’re going to investigate and get to the bottom of what went down,” she said.

In a statement, the department said that, during the seven-month stretch, the city recorded 412 shooting incidents and 489 shooting victims, compared with the previous all-time lows of 426 in 2017 and 522 in 2018.

With Reuters, AP