A crew member on the “Law & Order: Organized Crime” television show was fatally shot Tuesday at a filming location in Brooklyn, leaving real-life New York police officers to investigate a crime scene on the set of a show centered on fictional depictions of their department.
He was taken to Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, where he was pronounced dead about 6 a.m., police said, adding that no arrests had been made as of late Tuesday. A short, slender man dressed in a black hoodie was seen running from the filming location in the Greenpoint neighborhood, police said.
The area’s surrounding precinct has among the lowest murder rates in New York City, according to police data from January 2021 to May 2022.
Neighbors told local media outlets that with the filming location nearby, fictional crime scenes were nothing new. One resident, Janus Czuj, told the New York Post that he thought the shooting scene was part of a set. “I didn’t think it was a real tragedy,” he said, adding that he “saw the tape and thought, ‘Oh, it’s a movie.’ But this was a real shooting.”
“Law & Order: Organized Crime” stars Christopher Meloni as Elliot Stabler, a fictional New York Police detective. Its third season premieres in September.
NBC and Universal Television said in a statement: “We were terribly saddened and shocked to hear that one of our crew members was the victim of a crime early this morning and has died as a result. We are working with local law enforcement as they continue to investigate.”
While it was unclear whether the killing was related to Pizarro’s role on the show or whether the assailant knew him, it was the latest high-profile shooting death on a filming set since Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer, was killed on the set of the Western film “Rust” last year.
In that shooting, which left another crew member injured, a gun was fired with live ammunition inside instead of a decoy round. The gun went off in actor Alec Baldwin’s hands, and he has denied that he pulled the trigger. In March, his lawyers argued that he should be shielded from financial responsibility in the shooting.
