US: 1 police officer dead, 1 gravely hurt in Harlem shooting

The shootout occurred after cops responded to a domestic disturbance call

By AP

Published: Sat 22 Jan 2022, 7:21 AM

Last updated: Sat 22 Jan 2022, 7:29 AM

A New York Police Department officer was killed and another gravely injured Friday night after responding to a domestic disturbance call, according to a law enforcement official.

A suspect was also killed in the shooting in Harlem, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity.

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The official said a call had come in shortly after 5 pm of a mother needing help with her son. Three officers responded to the ground floor apartment on 135th Street.

They spoke to the mother in a front room, and then two officers went to a back room where the son was, and shots rang out, the official said.

The officer who died was 22 and had been on the job since November 2020 and the injured officer, 27, has been on the job for four years, the official said.

Police dispatch audio captured some of the chaotic scene, including an officer screaming for assistance and another officer informing the dispatcher that two officers had been shot.

One officer asks for “three buses” or ambulances to the scene, a six-story apartment building, and police to block off traffic on the route to nearby Harlem Hospital. The building is on a block between two iconic Harlem avenues: Malcolm X Boulevard and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

Mayor Eric Adams, himself a former police officer, was at the hospital where the officers were taken after the shooting, the third time in four days that officers have faced gunfire on the job. Inside the hospital entrance, a line of officers stood shoulder to shoulder at the top of some stairs.

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An officer was wounded in the leg Tuesday night in the Bronx during a struggle with a teenager who also shot himself. On Thursday, a narcotics detective was shot in the leg on Staten Island.

The last NYPD officer fatally shot in the line of duty, Brian Mulkeen, was hit by friendly fire while struggling with an armed man after chasing and shooting at him in the Bronx in September 2019.

Mulkeen’s death came about seven months after Det. Brian Simonsen was killed by friendly fire while he and other officers were confronting a robbery suspect at a cell phone store in Queens.

In 2017, Officer Miosotis Familia was ambushed by a gunman as she wrote in a notebook in a mobile command post. In 2016, Sgt. Paul Tuozzolo was killed in a gunfight with a man who’d broken into his estranged wife’s home.

In 2015, Officer Randolph Holder was shot and killed by a man riding a stolen bicycle in Manhattan and Officer Brian Moore died after he was shot by a man in Queens.

The year before, Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were fatally shot by a man who ambushed them as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn.