ERIC BAPTIZED AT JAIL
Message of ‘resurrection’ as he joins Rikers inmates in ritual
It was a very Good Friday for Mayor Adams, who was baptized with inmates on Rikers Island in what he said was a recommitment to the city and to his faith.
“This is Resurrection Sunday coming up,” Adams told the Daily News just two days before Easter, the holiest day on the Christian calendar. “We should all look at not only how we can resurrect our city, but how we can resurrect our own personal spaces.”
Adams was joined at the jail by the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, pastor of Brooklyn’s House of the Lord Pentecostal Church, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network.
The two ministers baptized Adams and 11 inmates Adams had met with through a prison ministry program called Fatherless No More, which focuses on rehabilitating incarcerated men.
Adams stressed the importance of mentors in the lives of young black men, and credited Daughtry for steering him in the right direction.
“Rev. Daughtry really put me on this pathway to be a police officer and a mayor,” said Adams, a former NYPD captain. “He said you need to funnel all that energy you have in a real direction.”
The mayor’s Good Friday visit was his second trip to Rikers this week. After witnessing inmates get baptized on his visit Tuesday, he promised he would be back, and do the deed himself.
COVID restrictions forced Rikers to shut down the baptismal pool in the prison’s chapel.
To baptize Adams and the others, Sharpton and Daughtry leaned them back, poured water on their heads and then washed their feet, as Jesus, according to the Bible, washed the feet of his disciples.
“It’s a symbol of cleaning your pathway from where you were to where you are going,” Adams said.
“I could have done it in any church in the city. But I wanted to do it on Rikers Island.
“I wanted to send a message that they are not forgotten by this mayor.”
Adams, who said he was first baptized 40 years ago, said the ceremony was very moving.
“We sat side-by-side as we took our shoes off to have our feet washed together,” Adams said.
“You’d have to see the faces of those inmates seeing the mayor right in the pews with them looking at them and not down at them.”
Adams said the rehabilitation of Rikers inmates is just as important to him as the safety of the city’s correction officers.
As an NYPD rookie, Officer Jonathan Diller was more mature than most cops just out of the Police Academy, his first commanding officer told the Daily News Friday.
At the same time, Diller, who was slain Monday evening in Far Rockaway, Queens, was nervous about doing his job right — but Inspector Igor Pinkhasov said the rookie quickly grew into his role, excelling on patrol in one of the 105th Precinct’s busiest areas before leaving last year to join the Community Response Team.
“A lot of times you don’t want to lose a good cop,” Pinkhasov said, “But I say, ‘It’s not a loss, it’s a gain for the Police Department and the community. CRT was looking for highly motivated people — and he was one of them.
“He was above and beyond everyone else, so that’s why I signed his paperwork and let him go to CRT.”
Pinkhasov, now assigned to the Detective Bureau, first met Diller in late 2021, when he arrived at the 105th Precinct after graduating from the Police Academy.
The commander latched onto Diller’s first name — the same as Pinkhasov’s son — as a talking point and assured him it was OK to be nervous.
Diller adapted quickly, Pinkhasov said. He fit in with the rank and file, playing catcher for the precinct softball team, and making quality arrests — 70 by the time he was shot dead.
“That’s 70 lives he affected in a positive way — the victims,” Pinkhasove noted.
Pinkhasov, speaking shortly before attending Diller’s wake, said the cops who knew and worked with Diller will struggle the most to deal with his loss, some likely wondering why they should continue in a profession that has been under attack from critics in recent years.
“But we have a job to do because the silent majority needs us,” he said. “For every two people that scream they hate us, there’s a thousand that love us.”