An NYPD cop shot and wounded a man who bashed in the window of a squad car in Brighton Beach Friday morning and then got into a fight with the police officer.
The suspect was struck in the shoulder and is expected to survive. He is in stable condition at Lutheran Medical Center but will not say why he vandalized the car.
He used a cobblestone, police said, but was not armed at the time of the struggle with Police Officer Matthew Sobota, 42. It appears, police sources said, that the 18-year NYPD veteran's gun was fired three times in the seconds-long struggle, which took place outside the Mounted Unit Troop E, on Brighton 3rd Street.
Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, the NYPD's top spokesman, said a civilian in a third-floor office heard the sound of breaking glass just past 5 a.m., looked outside and the saw the suspect attacking the car.
The employee ran down to the locker room and alerted Sobota, who was getting into uniform for his shift. Sobota ran outside and confronted the suspect.
"I heard someone scream 'Drop it, drop it, put it down, put it down,' then boom, boom, boom - three shots just like that," said Inna Bleyman, 48, whose apartment is above the incident. "This has been a very calm neighborhood up until just a few months ago. Recently we've had a lot of homeless and car vandalisms."
Another resident on the block, Jessica Sosa, 26, said someone busted windows in the neighborhood a month ago.
"They just went down the block destroying things - three cars got their windows smashed and some had their tires slashed," she said. "One of them was a car a cop \[who lives on the street\] owned."
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