A plainclothes police
officer was shot while patrolling a brownstone-lined street in Brooklyn
early yesterday, the police said, and the husband of another officer
was charged with attempted murder.Officer Jacqueline Melendez
Rivera, the wife of the accused man, was charged with hindering
prosecution and was suspended from duty. About 4 a.m. at Prospect Place
and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, the Police Department said, a man
pulled up in a sport utility vehicle alongside a car carrying four
plainclothes officers. He opened fire, hitting the driver, Officer
Andrew Suarez. The officer’s partners shot back.When the
police went looking for the gunman’s car, a white Acura with bullet
holes, they found it a little more than a mile away. Behind the wheel
was Officer Rivera, a law enforcement official said, and she told the
police that she was moving the car because her husband had parked it
illegally. Officer Rivera and her husband live less than two blocks
from the site of the shooting.Officer Rivera, 37, and her
husband, Jose Rivera, 31, were brought in for questioning, although
detectives did not think she had been in the car during the shooting, a
law enforcement official said.Mr. Rivera was accused of
attempted murder, defacing a firearm, criminal possession of marijuana
and other charges, the police said. Besides being charged with
hindering prosecution, Officer Rivera was accused of tampering with
evidence, possession of marijuana and obstructing governmental
administration, the police said.Officer Suarez was in critical
but stable condition, city officials said, and the shooting left a
trail of shattered glass and bullets at Prospect and Sixth.Officer
Suarez and three other members of the department’s anti-crime unit were
patrolling in an unmarked car when they locked eyes with people inside
the Acura, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.“Initially there was a glance exchanged, but no words were exchanged,” he said.
Mr. Kelly, who with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg visited the injured officer at New York Methodist Hospital, gave this account of what happened next:
The
Acura began tailing the unmarked car, and Officer Suarez, a policeman
for three and a half years, pulled over. The Acura then drew alongside
them, and its tinted passenger window slid down.The Acura’s driver leaned across the passenger, and yelled, “You got a beef?”
Then
the driver pulled out a gun and fired twice, just as Officer Suarez
raised his arm in defense. A bullet pierced his underarm, just clearing
his bulletproof vest, and tore across his back before lodging beneath
his neck.Then the Acura sped off, and the other three officers
opened fire on it, firing 13 shots in all. One of the bullets went
through the front and back windows of an unoccupied Subaru Legacy
Outback parked nearby, ricocheted upward and was later found 20 feet up
in a tree, the police said.Bullets also pierced the Acura and shattered several of its windows, but no one inside was hit, the police said.
Officer Suarez’s colleagues then took the wheel of the police car and drove him to Methodist Hospital.
Helicopters
buzzed overhead as dozens of officers descended on the neighborhood,
taping off the site of the shooting and searching the streets for the
Acura. It was spotted at Prospect and Fourth Avenues, with Officer
Rivera driving.Investigators also went to 33 St. Marks Avenue,
where the Acura was registered, a four-story row house near where
Officer Suarez had been shot.Officer Rivera lives there with
her husband and three young boys, neighbors said. Mr. Rivera and
another man were seen being led from the house in handcuffs by the
police shortly before dawn yesterday, neighbors said. The identity of
the second man was not released. And another woman and three small
children were also led out, neighbors said.The police also went
to the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Officer Rivera works,
and took her guns from her locker. Investigators did not believe they
had been used in the shooting, a law enforcement official said.About
5 p.m. yesterday, the police said they found a 9-millimeter Ruger
handgun, with one round in its chamber, in the bushes at the fence line
in the backyard of 33 St. Marks Avenue. The gun had not been issued by
the Police Department, the police said, and it was not yet known
whether it was used in the shooting.Yellow tape and police cars
sealed off access to Officer Rivera’s house and neighboring homes into
the evening yesterday, drawing curious stares from passers-by pushing
strollers.Neighbors were not sure how long the Riveras had
been married but said they met about four years ago, salsa dancing at a
club. Officer Rivera, whose two oldest sons are from a previous
marriage, is pregnant with her fourth child and was recently overjoyed
to find out the baby was a girl, neighbors said.Mr. Rivera is on
parole for first-degree assault, after having served four and a half
years for shooting someone in the leg and the chest after an argument
in Brooklyn, according to records from the State Department of
Correctional Services. More details of that shooting were not
immediately known.Officer Rivera was taken to the 78th
Precinct, and was being questioned there along with the two men
believed to have been in the Acura, one of them her husband, the police
said.Millie Santiago, 58, a longtime neighbor, said Officer
Rivera inherited the row house from her parents and rented out its
upper floors. “She’s a good parent, she’s a good wife,” Ms. Santiago
said. Officer Rivera is a veteran of the Persian Gulf war and has been
with the Police Department for 13 years, the police and neighbors said.Other
neighbors said lately there had been friction on the street because
Officer Rivera parked her car outside the house in front of a fire
hydrant, with her Police Department permit displayed on the dashboard.Officer
Suarez underwent surgery yesterday, and was expected to fully recover,
Mr. Kelly said. It was not clear whether the gunman initially knew he
was firing at an officer, a law enforcement official said. Officer
Suarez was the first New York City police officer to be shot on duty
this year, Mayor Bloomberg said.
