Two people were shot outside the Long Island home of Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) on Sunday afternoon. The Republican, who is running for New York governor, said his two teenage daughters were home at the time.
Zeldin said in a statement that he did not know the men shot, who were found underneath his front porch and in the bushes near his home. Police said there was no connection between the victims and the Zeldins.
A source in law enforcement told CNN that the men had been walking down Zeldin’s block when a car pulled up alongside them, with someone inside opening fire. The pair fled in the direction of the congressman’s home as the vehicle pulled away, the source said.
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Another police source told the New York Post that the victims, who were transported to a local hospital and expected to survive their injuries, were “known to the department.”
Zeldin’s 16-year-old twins, Mikayla and Arianna, had been “doing homework” at the kitchen table when the gunfire went off outside, he said in a statement posted on Twitter.
“They heard the shots. Boom! They went upstairs and locked themselves in the bathroom,” the congressman, who had been out of the house with his wife, told the Post.
The girls called 911 shortly after and were “freaked out” but unharmed, Zeldin said, hailing the twins who “acted very swiftly and smartly every step of the way.”
“Like so many New Yorkers,” he concluded his statement, “crime has literally made its way to our front door.” In a press conference held Sunday evening, Zeldin took a sharper tack, saying: “I’m standing in front of crime scene tape in front of my own house. You can’t get me more outraged than I am right now.”
The incident comes after the gubernatorial hopeful was attacked at an upstate stop along the campaign trail in July. He was speaking at a veterans’ event in Fairport on his “Unite to Fire [N.Y. Gov. Kathy] Hochul” bus tour when a man climbed on stage with what reporters identified as a cat-shaped self-defense key chain and accosted him. Zeldin was unharmed.
Focusing his campaign heavily on addressing crime, Zeldin has earned ringing endorsements from the 50,000-member Police Conference of New York and New York City’s Sergeants Benevolent Association, which last month called him the best candidate for “precarious times.”
Also in September, Zeldin received a show of support from former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who took to the conservative social media platform Gettr to call the congressman the “MAGA key to victory.”
Independent polls have shown Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Democratic incumbent, holds a tenuous and oscillating lead in the race. She has responded by vastly outspending her Republican opponent, dropping more than $1.5 million a week on ads since Labor Day, according to The New York Times.
Zeldin’s first statewide advertisement, “Take Back Our Streets,” aired last month. It features 13 clips of people being violently attacked, with audio of muted screams and gunshots in the background.
“You are looking at actual violent crimes caught on camera in Kathy Hochul’s New York,” a voiceover says in the spot. “And it’s getting much worse.”
That turned out not to be entirely true. Of the 13 incidents included in the spot, several had been recorded before Hochul’s time in office as governor. And one incident, featuring an elderly man being assaulted, was traced back not to New York but to Oakland, California.
Zeldin’s campaign acknowledged the California clip, saying it would be swapped out. “But this whole thing about the clips from when [Hochul] was lieutenant governor, she is not getting any type of a free pass,” he added in a statement.
Hochul said Sunday evening that she had been briefed on the nature of the shooting. “As we await more details, I’m relieved to hear the Zeldin family is safe and grateful for law enforcement’s quick response,” she added in a tweeted statement.
