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Newton 911 recording: 'There's bullets all over the place'

Print | Comments () Posted by Martin Finucane March 18, 2011 01:35 PM

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Newton Police

Newton police released this picture today of the suspect firing the gun into the store.

By Martin Finucane, Globe Staff

The moments after a man shot into a Newton jewelry store on Thursday were full of anxiety and uncertainty as a frantic caller reported that someone fired "bullets all over the place," according to a dramatic 911 recording released today by the Newton police.

Listen to the 911 call:

A man believed to be wearing a dark, collared jacket and a hooded sweatshirt with jeans fired a gun into Cristofori Jewelers at 291 Watertown St. just before 4:30 p.m. Thursday, police have said. Three employees were inside the store at the time. At least eight shots were fired.

No one was seriously injured, police later learned, but that wasn't clear when the emergency call came in.

In the call, a man reports the shooting. "We just had bullets fired!" the man said, saying someone in the store may have suffered "a potential hit."

"There's bullets all over the place," said the man, who said he worked in the store and was with two women.

At one point, a woman in the background can be asking another person if that person had been hit.

"Are you guys in a safe spot?" the dispatcher asks.

"I don't know. I don't think so. They shot right through the window ... from the outside," the man says.

The dispatcher stayed on the line with the man until sirens could be heard in the background. About 2 1/2 minutes after the call began, a police officer could be heard identifying himself, yelling, "Police! Police! Everybody all right?"

As they searched for the gunman today, police said that robbery may not have been the motive behind the shooting.

"This is still an open investigation, and we’re looking at all possible motives, but we don’t think the suspect was attempting a robbery because he made no effort to enter the store," said police lieutenant Bruce Apotheker. "This man just stood outside and fired eight shots into the building. We don’t even know if he knew there were people inside."

Apotheker said that nothing like this had ever taken place in that section of Newton.

"We’ve never had anything like this happen here," Apotheker said. "We don’t want people to think they’re unsafe."

The shooting shocked people at nearby businesses.

"I wasn’t scared, more concerned," said Terry Greenwood, who works at Newton Hair Company, across the street from where the shooting took place. "We weren’t sure what the sound [gunshots] was, I thought maybe it was a motorcycle or something.

"It’s really surprising, we don’t have much crime in this area," said Dan Tran, an employee of CTS Computers, a business a few doors down. "One of my co-workers saw a man jump over the fence in back of the jewelry store, that’s when we knew something was going on."

Globe Correspondents Sarah Thomas and Nicholas Goss contributed to this report.