Subway-hit vic a foe of ‘Girl’ statue
ONE COP SHOT a man carrying what appeared to be a real gun — and then a trio of officers saved his life.
The resourceful cops used sweatpants and a piece of a wooden door frame to make a tourniquet on Thursday night. The officers had responded to an active crime scene in Brooklyn where Naeem Graham was bleeding to death after whirling toward police and pointing a BB gun around 10 p.m.
Graham, 19, was plugged once in the leg in East Flatbush near the intersection of E. 34th St. and Church Ave.
Enter Officers Remy JeanFrancois, 33; Philip Longo, 30, and Kevin Hunter, 33. They stopped the bleeding.
“It’s a good feeling that you’re able to save someone’s life despite what had taken place prior,” Hunter said. “We would like to feel that we did all that we could.”
The drama began when someone called 911 to report a man with a gun at a store near the intersection.
Two uniformed officers, Fabian Modesto and his partner Richard Ortega, reached the store and confronted Graham and tried to arrest him. Graham took off with what appeared to be a gun in one hand. He suddenly turned and pointed the object at them, sources said.
Modesto, on the force six years, fired one round, hitting Graham in the left leg.
Longo, Hunter, and Jean-Francois, a 67th Precinct neighborhood coordinating officer, rushed to the scene.
“There was a blood trail from the entrance of the apartment building,” Longo said. “He was lying in a good amount of his own blood.”
Jean-Francois, a trained medic and volunteer firefighter from Rockville Centre, L.I., saw heavy bleeding and knew from experience that the bullet severed Graham’s femoral artery. He also noticed that Graham was taking short breaths.
“He was completely unresponsive,” he said. “It looked like his eyes were kind of rolling back in his head. The loss of blood was what was life-threatening.”
They removed Graham’s sweatpants. Francois then cut the string out of the sweatpants and made the tourniquet with the pants. He looped the string around the leg and then wrapped it around the piece of the door frame. He then twirled the wood around several times, tightening the string so that it stopped the flow of blood.
While the Finest worked on Graham, medics were having trouble getting to the scene because of a logjam of police vehicles, according to a 911 radio recording reviewed by the Daily News.
That was cleared up and medics reached Graham and fashioned a proper tourniquet.
They rushed Graham to Kings County Hospital, where he was initially thought likely to die. But doctors were able to stabilize him. They credit Jean-Francois with saving his life.
As for saving a man who minutes earlier had pointed what appeared to be a weapon at police, all three said they were just doing their jobs.
“It’’s second nature now. It’s what you are trained to do,” Jean-Francois said. “Once we determine that our officers are OK, we just dive right in and do what we were trained to do.”
Charges have yet to be filed against Graham, who has 17 prior arrests, including busts for robbery and weapons possession.
Graham posted a profane video on Facebook at about 6 p.m., four hours before he was shot.
“We about to do crimes,” he wrote. “I got to get up out of here . . . My gang member’s about to pop out. I’m about to get situated.”
The video shows him buying cups of ice. He poured liquor into the cups.
“I need to start going to school more,” he says at one point. A MAN hit and killed by a train Thursday was an artist who once lampooned the “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street by placing next to it a statue of a urinating dog.
Alexander Gardega, 48, was struck by a downtown No. 6 train at the Lexington Ave. and E. 77th St. station around 6:30 p.m.
Motorman James Muñoz, 46, said the train was about 100 feet away from the station when the emergency brake kicked in.
“So I just had to investigate and see what was the cause,” Muñoz said. “I have a flashlight, I was able to see it clearly."
Muñoz said he found Gardega between the seventh train car and the maintenance catwalk that runs along the tracks. He said Gardega was likely on the tracks when he was struck.
The Manhattan-based painter specialized in “oils and watercolors, generally in a naturalistic style,” according to his Facebook profile.
“Alex was a brilliant and passionate artist who loved to provoke reactions from people with his work,” the Gardega family said in a statement.
“He was also a sensitive soul who loved his family as much as we loved him.”