Police Investigation Says Bullet That Struck Wainscott Home Came From Maidstone Gun Club

An investigation by East Hampton Town Police detectives into a bullet that struck a Wainscott home in August has concluded that the bullet came from a so-called “assault-style” rifle fired nearly a mile away at the Maidstone Gun Club.

A detective’s report, made public last week by the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that seeks to have the gun club permanently closed down, points to a shooter who was not following the gun club’s safety procedures, was struggling to fire his gun accurately, and poor design and maintenance of the safety fail-safes at the range as factors that led to at least two bullets reaching a Merchants Path home about a mile away.

The report also seems to indicate that there is evidence that bullets flying off the gun club’s outdoor rifle range previously have gotten past wooden barricades that were supposed to stop them from leaving the range.

The owners of Merchants Path homes have reported bullets hitting their homes on at least eight separate occasions since 2004.

The report by Detective Luke McNamara was filed on October 20 but was only made public when it was added to a court file on Friday by attorneys for the five Merchants Path homeowners who filed the lawsuit in November, ahead of a hearing on Monday, January 9, on the court-imposed restraining order that has forced the entire gun club closed for more than a month.

The club had voluntarily closed the rifle range after August 5 when a bullet struck the home at 137 Merchants Path, owned by Roxana and Cristinel Pintilie. Security cameras at the Pintilies’ home captured the distant sound of gunfire and then the high-pitched noise of two bullets flying into the property, one of them impacting the roof with a sharp whack. The video shows two workers in the property’s rear yard seek cover and holler for the shooting to stop.

Police recovered a .30-caliber bullet that had lodged in the roof shingles of the home. Officers reported that the bullet appeared to have come from a southerly direction. In the home security video of the incident, a second bullet can be heard; the police report says that bullet has not been found.

The CCTV surveillance cameras at the Maidstone Gun Club, which is slightly less than a mile to the south-southeast of the Pintilies’ home, showed that at the same time two men were firing .30-caliber rifles at the club’s rifle range.

“Being that the bullet appeared to have traveled from a southern direction, and with the Maidstone Gun Club being in a [south-southeast] direction from the home, PO Gesa and other members of the patrol squad responded to the club to have any/all members on the range cease fire,” Detective McNamara wrote in his October 20 report.

The report does not indicate whether the shooters were still at the range when police arrived.

The rifle range at the Maidstone Gun Club consists of an enclosed shooting area with five shooting stands. Each stand has a seat and shooting table in front of a concrete tunnel. All shooters are supposed to sit, using the table to stabilize their rifle, when shooting.

The concrete tunnels are intended to ensure that shots are aimed directly down the range.

Beyond the end of the approximately 20-foot concrete tunnels are two wooden baffles across the top of the range intended to stop any errant bullets that might exit the tunnels on a trajectory that could carry them out of the range. The rest of the 200-yard range is open air. A 40-foot-tall earthen berm caps the end of the range.

McNamara’s report says that when the shooting range was examined on August 5, there was evidence of bullets having ricocheted off the inside of the concrete tunnel, and of some having struck the wooden protective baffle, leaving freshly splintered wood, and of others having passed cleanly through the timbers.

The surveillance video of the shooting area at the club, the detective says, also shows that one of the men was firing his weapon while standing up, rather than seated at the shooting tables — a violation of mandatory club policy.

The video, McNamara said, also shows the man struggling to get the weapon “sighted” properly.

The incident report identifies the two shooters by name, but the names of those who were interviewed by police are redacted in the copy of the report filed with the lawsuit.

The report says that the rifles being used by the two shooters at the time of the incident were an AR-15 and AR-10 — different models of the same popular .30-caliber medium-range rifle that have been categorized as “assault weapons” in state and federal laws and have been the subject of widespread debate nationwide over gun safety.

The guns are both supposed to be semiautomatic, meaning they only fire one bullet each time the trigger is pulled, as dictated by law.

One of the Merchants Path homeowners who is a party to the lawsuit told members of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee last summer that the homeowners have been told by police that the video from the gun club shooting area had indicated at least one of the guns used had apparently been illegally modified to make it fully automatic, meaning that the gun will fire multiple bullets in rapid succession when the trigger is held in the firing position.

The Town Police report indicates that one of the shooters at the club on August 5 was a Westhampton Beach Village resident. An East Hampton Town Police detective and two federal Department of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms agents visited the man at his home, but McNamara reports that he refused to cooperate or allow them to examine his gun.

The report says that the overhead baffle was supposed to have stone between the wooden timbers, intended to stop bullets that struck it. It says that the gun club’s board of directors had been told by the engineers who built the baffle that there was stone inside, but the detective’s say there is no stone in the baffle and that there was evidence of two bullets having recently passed cleanly through the wood on an upward trajectory.

McNamara said that ballistics experts interviewed by police indicated that the type of ammunition fired could travel the mile distance after having skipped off the concrete tunnel.

“In conclusion to this investigation, the following determinations have been made after all facts and evidence has been carefully reviewed,” McNamara wrote. “An individual(s) were shooting high powered AR weapon systems chambered with .30-caliber ammunition during the time frame that a bullet struck a house in the precise direction, 0.98 miles away … Concrete shooting tube structures at the Maidstone range designed to keep bullets traveling in one straight direction showed evidence of bullets skilling and potentially leaving the facility in a down range direction.”

The detective said that the evidence does not support criminal charges against anyone related to the August 5 incident.

For years, members of the gun club have argued that it would seem to be impossible for bullets to escape the rifle range and have blamed the bullets that hit homes on illegal shooting on public woodlands around the gun club.

On Monday, an attorney for the gun club added another police report to the court file — one that detailed Town Police responding to a November report of the sound of gun shots from a Merchants Path homeowner. The officer visited the gun club and reported that nobody was on the property.