Bloody Start to 2008 Follows Record-Low Year for Homicides

A string of eight violent incidents across the city during the early hours of the new year yesterday, including three shootings involving police officers, make it clear police have a difficult task ahead in 2008 as they try cut the number of homicides from last year's 494, the low point since reliable records have been kept.

The first recorded shots of 2008 were aimed at police officers. Before an hour had passed, bullets whizzed toward police in three separate shootings in the Bronx and Manhattan, hitting two marked police cars but leaving officers unscathed. Officers fired back one time, hitting a man in the buttocks.

In that incident, just after midnight, uniformed police approached a man they believed was carrying a gun. As the man fled, he fired at the officers before darting into a nearby apartment building, police said. The officers fired at the suspect. They then observed someone throw a backpack out of a sixth-floor window, and when the officers entered the apartment, they found a man with a gunshot wound to the buttocks. Police later recovered a 9-millimeter handgun from the backpack. The suspect, who was not identified, was listed in stable condition at Saint Barnabas Hospital, police said. He had not been charged as of yesterday evening. In separate incidents just before 1 a.m., two police cars were hit by gunfire in the Bronx and in Harlem, but police did not return fire and there were no injuries. No one was arrested in either incident.

The first homicide of 2008 happened in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, at about 2 a.m. Police found Samuel Schley, 28, lying with a gunshot wound to the chest near the intersection of Rockaway and Blake avenues. He died an hour later at Brookdale University Hospital, police said. Later, several clashes in the Bronx in quick succession left three people dead. In one, a bullet grazed the head of an 11-year-old girl as she was walking home at about 4 a.m. with her family from a New Year's Eve party in the Bronx, according to police. She was in stable condition at Saint Barnabas Hospital.

Just after 3 a.m., Kenneth McClinton, 17, was stabbed twice in the stomach near the intersection of 183rd Street and Walton Avenue in the Bronx during a fight involving about 20 people, witnesses said. He was pronounced dead at Saint Barnabas Hospital.

A man who has lived on the street for 12 years said he saw the fight start when members of two families that had been longtime rivals confronted each other on Walton Avenue. He said members of each group began wielding knives and beating each other with baseball bats.

In a second incident, police found Allan Atkins, 28, who had been shot numerous times, inside an apartment on Bronx Park South at about 3:30 a.m. He was later pronounced dead at Saint Barnabas Hospital, police said.

The fourth homicide was also in the Bronx. Police found the victim, an unidentified 31-year-old male, in Tremont with gunshots to his shoulder and hip. He was pronounced dead at Lincoln Hospital, according to police.

Police said investigations were ongoing.