“Everyone Was Screaming”

Returning from a late-night pizza delivery, Tara Abraham was pulling up to the parking lot behind Dixwell Plaza when she heard the shots.

She walked into Downtown Pizza to find a ​“hysterical” crowd — and a 47-year-old man lying on the floor with three bullet wounds. (The man remained in critical condition Sunday afternoon at the Hospital of St. Raphael.)

The shooting took place around 2:20 a.m. Sunday inside Downtown Pizza, a restaurant next to Stetson Library in the commercial plaza.

Abraham was working a late shift along with her boyfriend, a Sudanese native who also happens to be the owner’s nephew.

They entered the restaurant from the parking lot to find ​“a bunch of hysterical people. Everyone was just screaming,” Abraham said.

They saw about 10 or more people inside the restaurant’s four-table seating area. They also encountered two women who, amid their panic at the shooting, had hopped onto the counter and through the ordering window into the kitchen.

Then Abraham looked at the front table where the shooting had occurred. ​“I noticed there’s a bottle of alcohol on the table. We don’t sell alcohol. It’s a 40 (ounce), a green bottle.”

Abraham recalled the scene as she resumed serving customers Sunday afternoon. She and her boyfriend were back on duty, offering free slices for Mother’s Day. Her boyfriend had earlier cleaned the blood on the floor from the shooting.

Downtown Pizza recently started making deliveries all over town, Abraham said. And it delivers to crime-ridden neighborhoods that other outlets now avoid. So two-person teams deliver the pies.

A group of young men came in to hang out shortly before the shooting, according to Abraham. She said she didn’t recognize them. The Smoker’s Stop Convenience, a tobacco outlet also in the plaza, just started closing at 11 p.m. rather than stay open later because of neighborhood opposition. Some of the crowd hanging out there has migrated to Downtown Pizza, she said.

“Now all these customers were here last night,” she said. ​“They were asking if we have looses [like the Smoker’s Stop]. We don’t sell that.”

“Instead of the shooting being there where it was supposed to be, it was here,” she continued.

The police investigation into the shooting is in its early stages. So far the cops have determined that some kind of argument broke out involving two people, including 47-year-old Melvin Daniels; and that it ended with Daniels shot repeatedly, according to Sgt. Al Vazquez, officer in charge of New Haven police’s investigative division.

A large ​“acne-scarred” man fired the shots inside the pizza place at the man, according to the initial police report.

“There was some kind of dispute. We don’t know what kind of dispute. We don’t know why. We don’t know who,” Vazquez said late Sunday afternoon.

A witness who said he was outside the restaurant waiting for his order heard the shots and called the cops. The victim was subsequently rushed to the hospital for surgery. The victim’s brother was also outside the restaurant at the time of the shooting, police said. WTNH reported that the owner called the cops, too; the story quoted the owner as saying two men got into an argument, then one pulled out a gun.

Daniels suffered three bullet wounds, Vazquez said. He remained listed in critical condition Sunday afternoon. ​“It’s too early to tell” if he will survive, but ​“he made it through OR [surgery in the operating room, which is a positive sign,” Vazquez noted.

In other police news, a grandmother and three children were being treated for minor injuries at Yale-New Haven Hospital after being injured when their car collided with a tractor-trailer at Orchard Street and Legion Avenue at 11:09 a.m. Sunday, according to police spokesman Officer David Hartman.