Empire of fear
AS LARA GERAGHTY strolled along a Manhattan street last month, a sudden noise sent her scurrying for refuge.
“I ducked behind a pole . . . it sounded like a gun,” Geraghty recalled. “If I think it is (a gun), I’m hiding . . . I’m more frightened by things that sound like a gun.”
Geraghty, of Ridgewood, N.J., has good reason for the jitters.
Five years ago, she was headed toward the PATH train on W. 33rd St. when she walked into a bloodbath. A gun-toting man executed a co-worker before dying in a fusillade of police bullets outside the Empire State Building.
The carnage lasted just 120 terrifying seconds, but the horrors of Aug. 24, 2012, linger with the nine bystanders — including Geraghty — who were hit by stray NYPD bullets.
“It’s something I will never forget, that’s the only thing I can tell you,” said Madia Rosario, 48, wounded in the left calf. “The basic thing that helped me get through it was getting help.”
Rosario’s sessions with a therapist couldn’t erase all memories of the manic crime scene outside the landmark Midtown skyscraper.
Gunman Jeffrey Johnson, dressed to kill in a gray business suit and toting a briefcase packed with ammo, was gunned down by police after fatally shooting a former coworker.
The 53-year-old killer pumped five bullets from close range into Steven Ercolino, then slipped into the passing horde of humanity on Fifth Ave. as the NYPD closed in.
When Johnson pulled his .45-caliber handgun from his bag, two cops took him down with 16 gunshots. Several wayward bullets missed their target, instead leaving the wounded passersby bleeding outside the 102-story tower.
“All of a sudden, I just heard the gunshots,” Rosario told the Daily News outside her Brooklyn apartment. “I saw the man come around to the front of the building, and that was it.
“I didn’t realize I was shot until I saw the blood actually gushing down my leg, because I was still standing when everything was happening.”
Rosario, who was rushed to Bellevue Hospital, remembers the sirens of arriving ambulances. The sequence of events between seeing her own blood and her treatment at the facility remain a blur to this day.
Geraghty, now a stay-at-home mom with twin 4-year-olds and a 15-month-old, was across the street from the Empire State Building when she moved to let another pedestrian walk by.
“I just heard what sounded like fireworks going off,” she recounted. “I just ran, thinking it was going to be a mass shooting. I didn’t understand I was hit.
“I didn’t see the guy, I didn’t see anyone else that was hit, I didn’t know what was happening. I just saw that I was bleeding.”
Five of the victims filed a joint Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit against the city and the officers four years ago, charging the cops ignored the NYPD Patrol Guide and their tactical training.
The plaintiffs include Empire State Building employees Robert Asika, who was shot in the right elbow, and Marc Logossou, grazed in the right shoulder, along with Alberto Ramos, Eric Solder and Robert Neequaye.
Logossou was selling tickets to tourists eager to visit the top of the skyscraper when the sounds of gunfire filled the August air.
“Five seconds, it was all over,” he said of the wild gunfight. “I didn’t see anything. I just heard them. It happened fast.”
Neequaye, who declined comment on the grim anniversary, needed surgery to reattach the bone after a bullet fractured his left femur.
Neequaye’s wife claims in the suit that his injury left her deprived of his “affection . . . services and companionship, as well as his economic support.”
According to their lawyer, Michael Lamonsoff, the judge presiding over their case is still weighing whether to release the cops’ disciplinary records. Attorneys have yet to depose the cops, Lamonsoff said, because they want the information before questioning them.
Chenin Duclos, 36, of Chapel Hill, N.C., is suing the city on similar grounds. Duclos required surgery for a hip bone shattered by one of the bullets.
And Patricia Delos Santos, 61, declined to discuss the specifics of that morning when she was hit.
“The event harmed me a great deal,” she declared. “Do you understand?”
Five years later, the NYPD has done little to change its tactics when confronting armed combatants at populated locations, experts said.
“Better training could minimize injuries to bystanders, but the changes to training would need to be systemic and the NYPD has never exhibited any meaningful inclination to inaugurate fundamental changes,” said Daniel Modell, a retired NYPD lieutenant who used to work in the department’s firearms and tactics section. “In fact, except around the periphery, firearms training for law enforcement hasn’t changed in over a century.”
On average, about two bystanders are hit by police gunfire a year, according to a review of NYPD firearm discharge reports between 2012 and 2015. The 2016 report has yet to be published.
Between 2013 and 2015, six bystanders were wounded by police gunfire. Two additional bystanders were killed — including, in one case, the victim of a violent assault police were trying to stop in 2014, records show.
A year after the Empire State building turned into the O.K. Corral, NYPD cops opened fire on a mentally ill man in Times Square when he pretended to point a gun at them — but the officers instead struck a pair of innocent bystanders.
The NYPD did not immediately return a request for comment on the Empire State Building shooting or subsequent changes in training.
Rosario said she still suffers cramping in her calf when the weather gets rainy or cold, and she’s not looking forward to the anniversary.
“It is weird — I don’t look forward to listening to anything that has to do with that,” she said. “But it is what it is.”
Geraghty, who was grazed in the left thigh by a police bullet, said the uncomfortable feelings of that day five years ago return at random. She wonders what would happen to her three kids if someone opened fire inside a mall.
“It’s not rampant, but once in a while I think of it,” she said. “I’m more sensitive to times when I’m in a large mall . . . I’ll sit someplace and I’ll think, ‘If somebody started shooting, what would I do?’ ” She’s tried hard to move on. “I can’t say it stalls my life,” she said. “But it’s definitely in me.”