Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly paid a hospital visit to an elderly man accidentally shot by a cop during a Bronx drug raid.
Kelly was at Jacobi Medical Center to explain - not to apologize for the shooting in Soundview just after 7 a.m. Saturday, police sources said.
In an odd twist, Detective Andrew McCormack, who fired the errant shot, is the son of a cop killed nearly 30 years ago just a few miles away.
The city's top cop, at the bedside of 76-year-old Jose Colon, told the victim's wife and one of his sons that McCormack was trying to adjust a small flashlight on his 9-mm. Glock semiautomatic handgun, sources said. That's when the gun went off inside the apartment on Evergreen Ave.
Colon was semiconscious during the Kelly visit. He was in stable condition and expected to survive.
Police said cops assigned to the Emergency Service Unit came to the apartment to execute an arrest warrant and search for drugs. They were looking for Alberto Colon, 41, the shooting victim's son.
Cops arrested the younger Colon, who has a drug conviction on his record, and found a small stash of heroin. Police said he'd been previously been arrested more than a dozen times.
Neighbors were rattled by the early-morning commotion.
"I heard them say, 'We have a warrant to search your apartment,' " Gladys Burgos, 60, told the Daily News. "Then I heard banging. I thought they were breaking down the door. It woke me up. It was loud noise. I didn't know what it was. It could have been gun shots."
Drugs and violence plague the area, neighbors said. A little over a week ago, an 18-year-old was killed and another teen wounded during a shooting outside a bodega on nearby Wheeler Ave.
McCormack, an 11-year-veteran assigned to Bronx Emergency Service Unit 3, was part of the raid team dispatched to the fourth-floor apartment. It included ESU cops and narcotics cops.
McCormack was treated for trauma, and as is standard NYPD procedure at the request of district attorneys, was not immediately questioned by police about the shooting.
Steven Reed, a spokesman for Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson, said the office will "review the circumstances."
McCormack's father, Joseph, was killed on Sept. 29, 1983, when a mentally disturbed gunman who had barricaded himself in a house in Pelham Bay, rushed outside and fired a blast from a shotgun that ricocheted off a tree and pierced the 40-year-old cop's bulletproof vest. Cops returned fire and killed the shooter.
After McCormack's father was killed, his mother, Susan McCormack, co-founded Survivors of the Shield, a support group for the families of slain police officers.
No comments:
Post a Comment