Gunshots Signaled a ‘Need for Help’

Police were on high alert Friday and local schools were briefly put on lockdown as officers from nine departments conducted a townwide search for a despondent man who had fired a shotgun at his house in Springs and then left in his car with the gun.

“I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” Valon Shoshi, 28, later told police, but his family said they feared that he might hurt himself.

Mr. Shoshi had been staying with his parents and brothers on Gardiner Avenue. According to court papers, his mother, Atifet Shoshi, found him lying in his room Friday morning on top of a Mossberg pump-action shotgun he had recently purchased in Riverhead. She tried to take the gun away, but he pulled it from her hands and fired three rounds toward the wall, striking a TV and a clock. According to Mr. Shoshi’s statement to police, he was only trying to scare her. He told police he kissed her and then left the house. She was injured from flying debris, and was taken to Southampton Hospital, where she was treated and released.

After leaving the house, he called his brothers, Tony and Beni, who said they knew he had the gun with him and were worried. “That is why we had to get the cops involved. We were afraid he would do something to himself,” his brother Tony said yesterday.

Both brothers said yesterday that Mr. Shoshi had fallen into a deep depression in the past few weeks. He is grappling with an impending divorce from his wife, who lives in his native Kosovo, and had just returned late last month from a brief trip there.

Mr. Shoshi came here with his family as a teenager in 1999, just before the worst of the Kosovo War, with its ethnic cleansing of Albanians by the Yugoslavs. The Shoshis are Albanian. An amiable, hard-working young man, he was quick to make friends and build ties in the community. He volunteered with the Springs Fire Department and the East Hampton Ambulance Association, and had risen to the level of assistant chief in the ambulance association before returning to Kosovo a few years ago to marry.

He had recently moved back to East Hampton.

His depression worsened after his recent trip to Kosovo, his brothers said. He had been drinking heavily and hadsaid in a statement.

“This is not my brother. He is a loving person, a caring person,” Tony Shoshi said.

Initially on Friday, police believed that Mr. Shoshi may have gone to one of his brother’s houses in the area of the Crossways near Baiting Hollow Road in East Hampton. With nine different East End police departments lending manpower, two tactical units entered the house, only to find it vacant.

Police were told to be on the lookout for the black Cadillac sports car he was driving, a new car he had purchased in Florida just a few days earlier and driven home to East Hampton.

Local schools went on lockdown, or lockout as they called it, during the search, with parents informed via email.

About an hour later, Mr. Shoshi’s car was spotted heading north on Abraham’s Path in East Hampton. A police officer put on his emergency lights, but Mr. Shoshi did not stop. The officer followed in a slow pursuit onto Springs-Fireplace Road, until another police vehicle blocked off the Cadillac’s path in front of One Stop Market.

There, a brief standoff ensued, with police speaking to Mr. Shoshi on his cellphone. Eventually, he stepped out of the car, hands in the air, and was arrested.

The shotgun in the car had one shot in the chamber, with the safety off, according to police. East Hampton Town Police found no additional weapons at the house on Gardiner Avenue where Mr. Shoshi was staying with his parents, according to his brothers.

Schools lifted the lockdown and sent an “all-clear” email to parents shortly after Mr. Shoshi was taken into custody.

In East Hampton Town Justice Court on Saturday morning for his arraignment, Mr. Shoshi wore the black T-shirt he was arrested in. It was from the 2008 Golden Gloves, and read “Golden Gloves Eagle Boy.” Mr. Shoshi, a former boxer, fought in the Golden Gloves at 22. His nickname in the ring was Eagle Boy.

His family sat in silence as Justice Lisa R. Rana explained that the district attorney’s office had asked bail to be set at $100,000. He was charged with felony reckless endangerment and three misdemeanors: assault, illegal discharge of a weapon, and possession of a loaded gun in a motor vehicle.

“I have a lot of concerns,” Justice Rana said to Mr. Shoshi. “Your attorney says you would never hurt somebody, but you did. I don’t know what’s going on. You were very engaged in the community. You have been a real asset to the community. You have a squeaky-clean history. But it only takes one set of circumstances to turn someone’s life in the wrong direction.” As she spoke, several of those seated in the courtroom began to cry.

“If you are released, where are you emotionally? No matter what is going on in your life, there is a green pasture on the other side. My courtroom is filled with people who care about you. It can’t be so bad,” she said.

“Turn around. I want you to look at them. They are all there for you.” Mr. Shoshi looked at his family. “The next time you go down that rat hole, you may not come out,” Justice Rana said. While setting bail at $25,000, Justice Rana made a condition that he must immediately seek psychological treatment, ordering his attorney, Edward Burke Jr., to provide proof to the court by today that he had done so, or risk an increase in bail.

Justice Rana issued an order of protection, which allows Mr. Shoshi to see his family, but prohibits him from doing anything that would harm them. She also ordered him to surrender his passport to the court.

After his family posted bail and he was released, he was immediately hospitalized and is undergoing psychiatric examinations and treatment at Stony Brook University Hospital. His brothers said he will be transferred shortly to another facility.

By all accounts, Mr. Shoshi has had a difficult year. In November, with his marriage already beginning to sour, he was shot outside his house in Peja, Kosovo’s third largest city, after being approached by two assailants he did not know. The 6-millimeter bullet entered near his navel and exited above his left pelvic bone, just missing his femoral artery. He drove himself to the hospital, where he was treated without anesthetics.

He told The Star in late November that he had closed his arcade business in Peja and gone into hiding, with plans to return to the United States. When he did, his wife stayed behind.

Back on the South Fork, he went to work as a bartender for an old friend, Gino Bombace, the owner of Wolfie’s Tavern in Springs. “He is a great guy,” Mr. Bombace said Tuesday. “I have known him for six or seven years. We are like family.”

“He was one of the best bartenders I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Bombace said. “The customers loved him.”

Mr. Shoshi seems to have been well liked wherever he went. His brothers’ and cousins’ Facebook pages were filled with comments expressing love and concern for Mr. Shoshi and his family.

“He worked hard, he did his job, he was very dependable,” Barbara Borsack, deputy mayor of East Hampton Village said on Tuesday. Ms. Borsack had worked alongside Mr. Shoshi at the Ambulance Association. “I worked with him on calls. He was great,” she said.

Mr. Shoshi had also worked as an aide at the John M. Marshall Elementary School in East Hampton. “My grandson loved him,” Ms. Borsack said.

Few outside of his family were aware of his decline.

“He went through a lot of stuff back in Kosovo,” Beni Shoshi said yesterday. “He exploded. He is now getting the help he needs.”