KILLING MACHINE
Cop shooter had shield-piercing bullets, assault rifle in arsenal
FOUR COPS SHOT INSIDE a brooklyn apartment would likely have been killed if the ex-con had reached for another weapon in his arsenal — a sawed-off assault rifle with militarygrade bullets.
After the smoke cleared from the Easter Sunday gun battle, police found a Ruger Mini-14 known as a “poor man’s assault rifle.” It was loaded with bullets powerful enough to penetrate the ballistics shield Detective Kenneth Ayala carried into the apartment to protect the cops as they entered single file behind him.
Suspect Nakwon Foxworth, who was critically wounded in the shootout, fired a dozen shots from a 9-mm. handgun, but was steps away from the rifle.
“Foxworth was shot before he could reach for his sawed-off assault rifle. And a good thing, too,” said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. “It was loaded with 20 .223-caliber bullets, the kind the military uses.”
Kelly couldn’t help but consider the worst-case scenar- io.
“He could have done a lot more damage with an assault weapon he had no business possessing,” the city’s top cop said.
An additional 30 .223-caliber bullets were found in the apartment, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
Browne said the bullets were not technically “armor piercing,” but would have cut through the shield all the same.
“That would have been problematic, to say the least,” he said.
Three cops fired a total of 29 shots in what was described as “a running gun battle at very close quarters.”
Four of the six cops who went into the sixth-floor apartment were wounded, none of them critically.
Detective Mike Keenan and Officer Matthew Granahan were hit in the leg, while Capt. Al Pizzano was grazed in the lip.
Ayala was shot in both the thigh and ankle.
He was greeted with thunderous applause from fellow officers as he was wheeled out of Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn on Monday afternoon.
He said he couldn’t wait to see his family and downplayed suggestions that he saved the day by holding on to the shield, covering the other cops with him. “We all worked together,” he said. Outside Ayala’s modest brick duplex in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, a colleague maintained the detective was just being modest.
“For him to hold that shield while he was being shot was absolutely heroic,” the cop said.
“He ate those bullets and he stood fast. He saved all his co-workers."
When Ayala arrived home to his waiting wife, escorted by three NYPD emergency service vehicles, a lone bagpipe played as several police officers looked on with pride.
Pizzano and Granahan were released from the hospital Sunday. Keenan should be released Tuesday, hospital officials said.
The wounded officers, all assigned to the Emergency Service Unit, had responded to a call at a building on Nostrand Ave. about 10:30 p.m. on Saturday after Foxworth threatened a moving company employee who was blocking the service entrance.
Foxworth, 33, was arriving home from a party with his girlfriend, Jessica
Hickling, and their infant son.
When police banged on his front door, he refused to come out.
Fearing for the girlfriend’s safety, police began taking positions and summoned hostage negotiators.
Some time later, Hickling came running out clutching the baby. She left the door open, and police barged in.
Foxworth, an ex-con with a violent past, burst out of a rear bedroom and started firing.
A police source chalked it up to “uncontrolled rage.”
“It really doesn't make too much sense to take on a six-person police team with nowhere to go,” the source said.
Ayala apparently tried to take cover behind a table, Browne said, and exchanged gunfire with the suspect.
Browne said Foxworth intentionally fired below Ayala's shield, hitting cops in the legs.
The assault rifle was on the floor just inside the bedroom’s rear entrance, and a .22-caliber revolver was on the floor near the door to the kitchen — suggesting, police said, that Foxworth placed them there strategically.
Ammunition for the assault rifle was on an ottoman near the baby’s crib.
Police who traced the 9-mm. said it was part of a large order of guns bought in the fall of 2002 at a gun store in Wilmington, N.C.
The Ruger Mini-14 was bought in January 1998 in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., and reported stolen in 2007.
Mayor Bloomberg urged New Yorkers who want curbs on guns tightened to call Congress and rail about the 40% of gun sales that take place with no background check.
“If you want to stop the carnage, that’s the only way that I know to do that,” he said.
He said callers should tell their congressman or senator that, “It’s time for you to stop listening to the NRA and start doing something.”
“You have some of these pro-gun associations, like the NRA, the NRA repeatedly says, ‘Let’s enforce the laws on the books.’ Fine. I challenge them to help us get those laws enforced,” Bloomberg said.
Polls show national support for gun control laws dropped off a cliff over the past decade along with the crime rate.
Gun-shy Democrats, burned at the polls by Nra-funded candidates, have backed off on the issue.
The Obama administration has made no effort to push any new gun laws, even after last year’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.