Paul Bass Photo
Cops at the shooting scene.
(Updated 9:11 p.m.) “Papi” was walking in from the back room of Eliu’s Delight Mini-Market Monday night when two masked men entered and one of them opened fire, hitting him in the side.
The shooting took place at the market on Chapel Street a half-block from the Hospital of St. Raphael. It was the third shooting of a convenience worker in Connecticut this month. The other two were murders in Manchester and West Haven. It was also the second robbery-related shooting in New Haven reported within slightly more than three hours Monday. (Click here to read about the first.)
A woman living above Eliu’s heard a “boom-boom-boom” at 6:22 p.m. Monday.
“I thought it was a car accident,” she said.
She rushed downstairs. “Papi got shot,” people around the store informed her .
That’s the name by which she and other neighbors know the clerk, whose real name is Johnny Jimenez. He is in his late 30s, according to police. “He is a very sweet guy,” the upstairs neighbor said. “He gives you a credit in the store and everything.”
Edwin Melendez was in the passenger seat of a truck stopped at the traffic light at Sherman Avenue and Chapel when the shooting happened. His wife was driving; they were heading home.
“I hear two gunshots,” he said. “I see two guys get out” and run down an alley next to the store. (He’s at right in the photo above telling his story to the police.)
Jimenez appeared to have walked into the main area of the store during an attempted robbery when he was shot.
The bullet entered Jimenez’s body through the side “in the abdomen area,” said Sgt. Al Vazquez.
The clerk was taken across the street to St. Raphael’s. His injuries are non-life-threatening, according to Vazquez.
Kerry Ellington (at left in photo) lives next door the store, in an apartment building at 1375 Chapel.
“I see Papi every day working hard,” she said. “It’s sad a hard-working man has to go through this.”