Three people were killed and eight others wounded when multiple gunmen opened fire inside a crowded Brooklyn hookah lounge and restaurant early on Sunday morning, according to authorities.

Police officers responded to reports of a shooting inside the Taste of the City lounge in Crown Heights just before 3.30am, New York police department (NYPD) commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said at a press briefing later on Sunday.

Citing a preliminary, ongoing investigation, Tisch said it appeared the shooting stemmed from gang violence.

The three people who were killed were all men and were all pronounced dead at the scene. They were ages 19, 27 and 35, police said.

Attributing the information to friends, the New York Daily News identified one of those slain as 35-year-old Jamel Andre Childs. Childs was killed while trying to stop a fight that preceded the shooting, the Daily News reported.

Of 11 victims, Tisch added, eight were men and three were women. Their known ages ranged from 27 to 61.

The eight wounded victims – five men and three women – were taken to local hospitals with what police said were non-life threatening injuries.

Tisch said there were at least four different shooters who fired dozens of rounds in the lounge, striking numerous bystanders. She also said officers had collected at least 42 shell casings inside the lounge that came from 9mm and .45-caliber guns.

Officers had recovered one gun near the scene of the shooting, and they were trying to determine whether it was connected to the case, Tisch said. Investigators did not immediately name any suspects or announce arrests.

Tisch made it a point to say New York City had registered “the lowest number of shooting incidents and shooting victims seven months in the year … on record”.

Nonetheless, “it’s a terrible thing that’s happened”, she said.

“It’s a terrible shooting,” Tisch added. “There’s no other way to describe it.”

“I can easily stand here and tell you that we have driven down crime, that we have removed over 2,000 illegal guns off our streets,” New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, said at a briefing. “I can give you those numbers and those stats. But that does not comfort those who are victims of gun violence.”

Taste of the City Lounge, located less than a half mile from the historic Brooklyn Museum serves American and Caribbean plates with a full bar, hookah and DJs.

The business opened three years earlier and was the scene of another shooting in November 2024. That earlier case was non-fatal.

The typically Jewish and West Indian area where the shooting occurred has been undergoing rapid gentrification in recent years.

In 2017, a bar advertising its “bullet-ridden” wall caused outrage, with residents accusing the owner of insensitive stereotyping that overlooked the realities and toll of gang violence.

As of Sunday, there had been more than 270 mass shootings in the US this year – or 1.18 a day, according to the nonpartisan Gun Violence Archive. The online resource defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are wounded or killed.

The US’s perennially high rates of such shootings have prompted calls from some in the country for more substantial gun control. But Congress has largely been unable or unwilling to heed those calls.