Two
police officers sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn were shot at
point-blank range and killed on Saturday afternoon by a man who,
officials said, had traveled to the city from Baltimore vowing to kill
officers. The suspect then committed suicide with the same gun, the
authorities said.
The
officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were in the car near Myrtle and
Tompkins Avenues in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the shadow of a tall housing
project when the gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, walked up to the
passenger-side window and assumed a firing stance, Police Commissioner
William J. Bratton said. Mr. Brinsley shot several rounds into the heads
and upper bodies of the officers, who never drew their weapons, the
authorities said.
Mr.
Brinsley, 28, then fled down the street and onto the platform of a
nearby subway station, where he killed himself as officers closed in.
The police recovered a silver semiautomatic handgun, Mr. Bratton said.
Mr.
Brinsley, who had a long rap sheet of crimes that included robbery and
carrying a concealed gun, is believed to have shot his former girlfriend
near Baltimore before traveling to Brooklyn, the authorities said. He
made statements on social media suggesting that he planned to kill
police officers and was angered about the Eric Garner and Michael Brown
cases.
Authorities
in Baltimore sent a warning that Mr. Brinsley had made these threats,
but it was received in New York at essentially the same time as the
killings, officials said.
The
shootings, the chase, the suicide of Mr. Brinsley and the desperate but
failed bid to save the lives of the officers — their uniforms soaked in
blood — turned a busy commercial intersection on the Saturday before
Christmas into a scene of pandemonium.
The
manager of a liquor store at the corner, Charlie Hu, said the two
police officers were slouched over in the front seat of their patrol
car. Both of them appeared to have been shot in the head, Mr. Hu said,
and one of the officers had blood spilling out of his face.
“Today
two of New York’s finest were shot and killed with no warning, no
provocation,” Mr. Bratton said at Woodhull Hospital in Williamsburg,
where the officers were declared dead. “They were, quite simply,
assassinated — targeted for their uniform and for the responsibility
they embraced to keep the people of this city safe.”
“Officer
Ramos and Officer Liu never had the opportunity to draw their weapons,”
he continued. “They may have never even seen the assailant, their
murderer.”
Mayor
Bill de Blasio, standing beside the police commissioner, said, “It is
an attack on all of us; it’s an attack on everything we hold dear.”
Mr.
de Blasio said he had met with the officers’ families, including
Officer Ramos’s 13-year-old son, who “couldn’t comprehend what had
happened to his father.”
Read More http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/two-police-officers-shot-in-their-patrol-car-in-brooklyn.html?_r=0
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