Man captured after he entered a Bronx police station and started shooting, hours after he approached a van and fired at officers

This article is more than 7 months old

This article is more than 7 months old

A gunman is in custody after he ambushed police officers in the Bronx twice in 12 hours, wounding two in attacks that ignited outrage from officials who blamed the violence on an atmosphere of anti-police rhetoric.

The man, whose name was not immediately released, was captured after he walked into a police station in the Bronx and started shooting early on Sunday, hitting a lieutenant in the arm and narrowly missing other police personnel before he ran out of bullets, lay down and tossed his pistol, police said.

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That attack came just hours after the same man approached a patrol van in the same part of the Bronx and fired at two officers inside, wounding one, police said.

Despite multiple shots fired in both incidents, nobody was killed and all are expected to recover, police said.

“It is only by the grace of God and the heroic actions of those inside the building that took him into custody that we are not talking about police officers murdered inside a New York City police precinct,” Dermot Shea, the New York City police commissioner, said at a press conference on Sunday.

Donald Trump immediately used the shootings to assail New York’s Democratic mayor and governor.

“I grew up in New York City and, over many years, got to watch how GREAT NYC’s ‘Finest’ are. Now, because of weak leadership at Governor & Mayor, stand away (water thrown at them) regulations, and lack of support, our wonderful NYC police are under assault. Stop this now!” he tweeted.

Shea called the gunman a “coward” and said he had a lengthy criminal history. He said the man was paroled from prison in 2017 after a conviction for attempted murder.

The commissioner also lashed out at criminal justice reform activists who have held demonstrations against excessive force by police in recent months, including a large protest in Grand Central Terminal. He suggested that the protests helped create an anti-police environment.

“These things are not unrelated. We had people marching through the streets of New York City recently,” Shea said. “Words matter. And words affect people’s behavior.”

Shea didn’t offer any evidence that the gunman in this weekend’s attacks knew of those protests or was influenced by them.

New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, who won office partly on a promise to reform overly aggressive policing of minority communities, also suggested that while police had a right to protest, anti-police sentiment had gotten out of hand.

“This was an attempt to assassinate police officers. We need to use that word,” the Democratic mayor said Sunday.

Two security camera videos, posted on social media, captured the shooting inside the headquarters of the 41st precinct, which happened shortly before 8am.

The shooting inside the precinct headquarters came just hours after another attack in the same section of the Bronx, involving the same suspect.

Two officers narrowly escaped with their lives when a gunman fired into their patrol van just before 8.30pm on Saturday.

The two uniformed officers, partners for eight years and friends since middle school, were sitting in their van with emergency lights activated when a man approached them and engaged them in conversation, Shea said.

The man asked the officers for directions, then pulled out a gun “without provocation”, the commissioner said. The man fired multiple shots, grazing the officer behind the wheel in the chin and neck, and narrowly missing an artery.

Neither officer returned fire. The officer’s partner drove him to a hospital nearby and he is expected to be released Sunday.

“He is lucky to be alive,” Shea said. “He is expected to make a full recovery and it is a miracle.”

The attacks recalled other unprovoked assaults on police officers sitting in their patrol vehicles.

In 2017, a gunman killed an officer, Miosotis Familia, as she sat in her patrol vehicle in the Bronx. In 2014, two officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, were shot dead in their patrol car in Brooklyn by a man upset about recent police killings of unarmed black men.

The killings of Ramos and Liu had also followed large street protests and some officers blamed De Blasio for expressing solidarity with the demonstrations, and turned their backs on the Democrat at the funerals.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said in a tweet on Sunday he was “horrified by the multiple attacks” on police. “NY’s law enforcement officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe. These attacks are heinous.”