Siege at the Gun Shop

Beneath the soot-black elevated tracks in Brooklyn's decaying Williamsburg section, four young black men entered the John and Al sporting-goods store at 5:30 p.m. one day last week. Once inside, they pulled guns from their coats and ordered everyone to line up with their hands in the air. Thus began one of the strangest sieges in years.

The men obviously wanted money, but they were also after the store's merchandise-arms and ammunition. As they held their guns on the dozen or so customers, a high school student named Daniel Martinez wandered in unnoticed and saw one robber stuffing dozens of guns into a duffel bag. As they worked, the men addressed one another by numbers-1, 2, 3, 4. Martinez quickly sidled out the door.

Shortly after the robbers entered the store, a silent alarm, set off accidentally, alerted the police. Within minutes they arrived at the store, just in time to catch the gunmen leaving by a side door. They were using one of the store's owners, Samuel Rosenblum, as a shield. After a rapid exchange of fire, in which one policeman was wounded in the hand and arm, the four men retreated into the gun shop. There they took the twelve people in the store as hostages.

Doctor. By this time the street outside, Broadway, was turning into a battlefield. Police extinguished the street lamps, halted traffic and elevated trains running overhead. The four gunmen, reinforced by an arsenal of rifles, shotguns and pistols, fired freely at the moving shapes in the darkness. One patrolman, Stephen Gilroy, 29, leaned cautiously forward from behind a steel girder; an instant later he was shot in the head and fell dead.

In the early evening, the gunmen released one hostage, a girl named Judy Maladet, to plead for a doctor. Running terrified across the street and into the arms of a policeman, she reported that one robber was badly wounded and "lying on the floor spitting up blood." Five hours later, the gunmen released a second hostage with the same request, but police refused to send in a doctor unless they surrendered.

Word had got out that the four gunmen were members of the Black Muslim sect. An old World War II personnel carrier delivered to the scene a Black Muslim minister who had agreed to plead with the men. He refused to disclose his name lest his standing among his followers be damaged by cooperation with the police. Speaking first in English and then in Arabic, he appealed to the gunmen to come out. If they would blink the store lights three times, he said, he would enter the store alone.

After a long silence, the lights blinked, and the minister strode bravely in, his arms outstretched. He stayed for 20 minutes and said later that the gunmen had told him: "This is the end; this is glory. We'll go out in a hail of bullets." Then, from the safety of the personnel carrier, the minister called aloud to ask the gunmen whether they wanted him to return to lead them out to surrender. This time they responded with three shots in rapid succession. The minister gave up and faded into the night, his robes floating around him.

More than 24 hours after the shooting started, the gunmen decided to release a third hostage in return for some medical attention. The black neurosurgeon who agreed to go inside, Dr. Thomas Matthew, reported later that he had treated one man, "No. 4," for a stomach wound. The others, he said, appeared to be in no hurry to surrender -particularly since the police had relented and delivered boxes of food to the door. "I think they plan to take up residence in there," the doctor said.

"It's a waiting game," said New York Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy. "We have nothing to gain by forcing our way in there." And so, as the week ended, the siege went on.

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