Officer’s shooter had ranted about police abuse
AG Jeff Sessions calls the killing a ‘murder in cold blood’
NEW YORK — A killer who strode up to a mobile police command post and put a bullet in an officer’s head Wednesday had ranted in a Facebook video last September about law officers killing and abusing people, and warned them to leave him alone or “we gonna do something.”
“I’m not playing, Mr. Officer. I don’t care about 100 police watching this,” 34-year-old ex-convict Alexander Bonds said, adding: “It’s time for people to wisen up.”
Ten months later, Bonds went up to the RV-like command post in the Bronx and ambushed Officer Miosotis Familia, shooting her through the passenger side window around 12:30 a.m.
Police Commissioner James O’Neill said Familia was “assassinated in an unprovoked attack on cops.”
Familia’s partner frantically radioed for help, and officers caught up with Bonds about a block away and killed him in a hail of about 20 bullets when he pulled a stolen revolver, police said. He didn’t get off a shot, authorities said. The burst of gunfire as the Fourth of July wound down was initially mistaken by some people for fireworks.
The 48-year-old Familia was a 12-year veteran of the police force who spent her entire career with the New York Police Department in the high-crime Bronx precinct. The command post there had been set up and staffed around the clock since a triple shooting in March.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said Familia “was on duty serving this city, protecting people, doing what she believed in and doing the job she loved.”
Police said they were trying to establish the motive for the shooting.
While tensions have been running high in recent years between police and black people around the country, there was no immediate indication the killing had a racial dimension. Bonds was black; Familia was black and Hispanic, her family having come from the Dominican Republic. She apparently had no previous contact with him.
Still, the attack recalled the 2014 ambush killings of two New York officers who were gunned down in their cruiser by a man who had announced online moments before that he was planning to shoot two “pigs” in retaliation for the police chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man. The gunman, 28-yearold Ismaaiyl Brinsley, then killed himself.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Familia’s killing a “murder in cold blood.”
“These attacks must stop,” he said in a statement.
Familia had three children, including twins, lived with her mother and worked the midnight shift.