A 26-year-old man showed up at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Wayne with a gunshot wound that investigators later traced back to a stretch of Paterson near River and Putnam streets — except when police went looking for where it happened, they came up empty. No shell casings, no blood trail, no confirmed scene. Just a wounded man and a lot of unanswered questions.
According to Patch, police were called to the hospital at about 9:30 p.m. Wednesday after a report that a 26-year-old man had been shot without being fatally wounded. Daily Voice, however, reported that Paterson police responded at 9:20 p.m., a discrepancy that remains unresolved in the public record. Passaic County Prosecutor Camelia M. Valdes and Paterson Police Officer-in-Charge Patrick Murray both said officers responded to the hospital after receiving a report of a man with a nonfatal gunshot wound, per Daily Voice’s reporting.
Investigators determined the man had been shot in the area of River Street and Putnam Street in Paterson. But when officers checked out that location, they came up with nothing. Patch reports that Paterson police were unable to find any evidence of a shooting, and as a result, they could not even establish a crime scene there.
No Scene, No Suspects, No Answers Yet
As of Thursday morning, the investigation remained open with no suspects identified and no arrests made, the same Patch report notes. Nothing in the available record indicates how long the man may have been hospitalized or offers further detail on his condition beyond the gunshot wound being nonfatal.
Authorities are asking anyone with information to come forward. Tips can go to the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office tipline at 1-877-370-PCPO, through an anonymous online submission at pcponj.opsnetwork.org/tips, by email, or by calling the Paterson Police Shooting Investigation Unit at 973-321-1342.
A City Watching Its Shooting Numbers Shift
The case lands amid a notably mixed year for gun violence in Paterson. Back in May, NorthJersey.com reported that multi-victim shootings were rising as the weather warmed, with one incident that month marking the fourth consecutive multiple-victim shooting at a high-crime site within a single month. That stretch included a late-night burst of gunfire near Rosa Parks Boulevard and Godwin Avenue that left two men dead and four other people wounded, according to News 12 New Jersey. Officers who arrived on that scene found six people with gunshot wounds, all taken to St. Joseph’s University Medical Center, while a seventh person reportedly left on their own; a 43-year-old man and a 29-year-old man, both from Paterson, were pronounced dead, while the remaining four victims were listed in stable condition. News 12 noted that shooting was the city’s second mass shooting in a month, following a mid-April shooting that killed one person and wounded three others. At the time, Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh pointed to longer-term progress, saying shootings had dropped 60% and gun-violence victims had fallen 66% over the prior two years.
By late summer, the trend line had turned sharply downward. Three people were shot in Paterson between June and August, compared with 11 during the same stretch the year before, a 73% decrease, according to the Jersey Vindicator. Shooting incidents over that same window fell from 11 to three, the outlet reported. Through August 30, shooting incidents citywide were down 55%, from 31 to 14, compared with the same period the previous year, and the number of shooting victims fell 22%, from 32 down to 25, per the same report. Paterson Police Department Officer in Charge Patrick Murray attributed the decline to the department’s ongoing efforts to improve public safety.
A separate accounting from the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General found that total reported crime in categories tracked by the department was down 16% through August 30 compared with the same period in 2025.
Against that backdrop of declining numbers, Wednesday night’s case stands out for its ambiguity rather than its scale — a single wounded man, a location investigators could not confirm, and a prosecutor’s office still working to piece together what happened.
