Manhattan Terror Attack 31 October 2017

Witness accounts

News footage showed crowds of spectators -- some capturing the scene with cellphone cameras -- gathered behind police lines. A white Home Depot truck with the front end smashed was also visible.
Eugene Duffy said he had just left work at Pier 26 and was waiting on the light to cross West Street when he heard a scream. He thought it might have been a Halloween prank but he said the scream was bloodcurdling.
"I look down and I see a white pickup truck a couple of more blocks down in the bike path," he said. "Automatically, I know something's wrong. Then, as I go down more toward where the girl is screaming, I see two gentlemen laying there and they have tire tracks marked across their bodies. You could tell they both weren't here."
He continued to walk closer to the scene. Gunshots rang out. He saw police officers ducking for cover. A yellow school bus was smashed nearby. Police descended on the area.
"I thought automatically, this area, I thought it was terrorism," he said.
Michael Corbin, the assistant real estate manager for District Council 37, the city's largest public employees union, was standing outside the union's lower Manhattan offices attending to a woman who slipped and fell on the sidewalk.
"The first responder to the event was a counterterrorism officer," he said. "We were attending to the victim, getting her onto a stretcher and, at that moment, we heard gunshots. I recalled hearing five gunshots in quick succession and immediately the officer ... left to investigate the situation from the direction we heard the noise coming from."
Another witness, Ramon Cruz, described what he saw.
"What I saw was that the driver -- he didn't look like he was bleeding," said Cruz. "He was dragging his foot. He looks frustrated, panicked, confused. People are running past me, saying, 'He's got a gun. He's got a gun.' I didn't see any gun.
"It was a white pickup truck. He looked pretty bad without bleeding or anything like that. I didn't see him hit anybody. All I heard was the impact of a crash."
Tuesday afternoon on Twitter, a user posted an image of a person lying on the ground near the scene of an incident near West & Chambers Streets in Manhattan.