A still image from surveillance footage showing the start of the deadly shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey, Dec. 10, 2019. Photo: Screenshot.

The killers of four people in the attack on a kosher market in Jersey City on Tuesday were likely targeting a yeshiva next door that was filled with children, the town’s mayor said late last week.

“My opinion is that as more info comes out it’ll become increasingly clear that the target was the 50 children at the Yeshiva attached to that store,” Mayor Steven Fulop, who is Jewish, tweeted.

“We will never know 100% but the doorway to the yeshiva was 3 feet away + it seems [the attacker] goes in that direction 1st,” he added.

The two killers, a man and a woman connected to the Black Hebrew Israelites group, which sometimes traffics in antisemitism, murdered Detective Joseph Seals and then moved on to the kosher market, where they killed three others — Mindy Ferencz, Moshe Deutsch, and Douglas Miguel Rodriguez.

The area in which the shooting took place is home to a large community of Orthodox Jews.

In a CNN interview, Fulop repeated his analysis of the attack, saying, “I think one can assume [the yeshiva] was the intended target, so this could have been much much worse.”

Echoing the consensus among law enforcement officials, Fulop said of the attack, “It was no question a hate crime, no question rooted in antisemitism.”

“If anti-Semitism can exist in a place that’s accustomed to diversity, it can…exist anywhere,” Jersey City Mayor @StevenFulop says on the kosher market attack. “…Every moment that you don’t call it out, you’re wasting an opportunity to bring attention” https://t.co/xrCxsgSu0n pic.twitter.com/FaXsS0ICiG

— CNN This Morning with Audie Cornish (@CNNThisMorning) December 13, 2019