Tearful ex-cop blows away armed carjacker
A retired NYPD detective fatally shot a wouldbe carjacker in Brooklyn early Tuesday — and later broke down in tears as he explained his lifeordeath decision.
“I didn’t want to die,” said former cop Derrick Bishop, 55.
He was working the graveyard security shift outside of a bottling facility in East New York when the men crept up to his 2004 Mercedes around 3:15 a.m.
Bishop said he was waiting to open the gates for a truck when Manuel Ocampo, 18, pointed a 9mm pistol at his window at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Linden Boulevard.
“I looked at him, and I see his hands and see he has a 9mm pointed at my face,” a shaken Bishop recalled outside his Brooklyn home.
“Then he told me he’s going to blow my brains out, he would shoot me in the face if I didn’t hand him my money.”
Bishop rolled down the window and handed some cash and a few lottery tickets, but the thief ordered him to get out of the car and dig through his pockets.
“He kept saying, ‘That’s all the fk you got? I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna shoot you,’ ” Bishop said.
“So I started taking everything out of my pocket and throwing it on the ground, hoping he would look down at the ground because I was trying to get some type of advantage and it just didn’t look good.”
Ocampo then grabbed the former cop’s keys and got in the driver’s seat while still aiming the gun at Bishop and trying to unlock the passengerside door for his cousin, Rashawn Thompson, 18.
When the armed thief looked away, Bishop pulled out his legal Glock 9mm and shot Ocampo four times in the chest and neck, he said.
“I thought I was gonna die in the car at that time,” Bishop said, wiping away tears. “I didn’t want to die. I wanted to be able to see my kids and my wife.”
Ocampo tried to run but collapsed on Georgia Avenue, where officers found him clutching his gun. He died at Brookdale Hospital.
Bishop said that one of the responding officers told him that Ocampo’s gun had jammed, preventing him from shooting Bishop.
“Believe me, I feel blessed and lucky — you name it,” he said. “Whoever his name is up there, God, Jehovah, Buddha, whatever it is, I believe it.”
Thompson ran to his home on nearby Cozine Avenue and told his mother that someone had shot at him — but she dragged him back to the scene, where he was taken into custody, sources said.
The exdetective, who patrolled Crown Heights before retiring in 2003, was treated at Kings County Hospital for an asthma attack.
Sources said surveillance video shows Ocampo and Thompson approaching the car and then running away after the shots were fired, but does not show the robbery and shooting.
Ocampo had a long rap sheet with charges including robbery and possession of a weapon.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona and Frank Rosario