The story of Jacqueline Melendez Rivera, a police officer who stands accused of helping the man she loved cover up a shooting in Park Slope last week, is a sad and strange one.

One freezing cold morning, Officer Rivera’s
husband, Jose Rivera, shot a plainclothes officer, Andrew Suarez, 25. Mr. Rivera then sped
away, they said, as bullets fired by the officer’s colleagues tore into
his sport utility vehicle and shattered its glass.

Officer Rivera was found less than an hour later behind the wheel of
what the police said was the same S.U.V., about a mile from her home in
Prospect Heights. The police concluded that she had not been in the
S.U.V. when the shots were fired, but that she was trying to hide it to
conceal her husband’s crime.

The Times’ has an in-depth look at this couple, who met at 200 Fifth and who lived in a brownstone Officer Rivera inherited from her mother on St. Mark’s Place.