Cop killed on his wedding day
Groom, fellow officer killed
It should have been the happiest day of this cop’s life — instead, it was his last.
Two off-duty NYPD officers — one a groom on his wedding day — were killed Sunday night when they took a rented Maserati for a spin after the reception and plowed into a tree.
Newlywed Michael Colangelo, 31, a 10-year officer with the NYPD’s K-9 Unit, and his buddy, Officer John M. Martinez, 39, of Brooklyn’s 84th Precinct, were speeding along a country road in upstate Ulster County when they missed a turn and crashed at around 11:30 p.m., flipping the sports car onto its roof, police and witnesses said.
In a few hours, Colangelo’s sweetheart, nurse Katherine Berger, went from blushing bride to shattered widow.
“She’s grief-stricken,” State Police Maj. Pierce Gallagher said at a press conference Monday.
A witness said Colangelo’s dis- traught dad arrived at the scene in the town of Shandaken minutes after the crash.
“The worst part was the groom’s father. They held him back about a block up the road here,” said resident Gregory Zaff, 72. “He was screaming and banging on the cars like a madman for five or 10 minutes. It was terrible to listen to him wail. They had to sedate him.”
It was unclear whether alcohol was involved, Gallagher said, but a guest at the nearby Catskills resort where the wedding was held angrily told The Post on Monday, “They shouldn’t have been driving,” declining to say more.
It also was unclear how fast the car was going, although police said that it clearly had been speeding and that the two cops likely weren’t wearing seat belts.
Martinez, a married father of two from Hauppauge, LI, had rented the black 2018 Maserati and was behind the wheel. Colangelo, who lived in Huntington Station, LI, with Berger, was his front-seat passenger.
A second passenger, Cody Ka- lina, 28, of Wantagh, LI — a civilian and childhood friend of Berger’s who was believed to have been Colangelo’s best man — was in the back seat and wearing a seat belt, cops and sources said. He survived the collision.
“As far as we can tell, they were taking this car out for a ride,” Gallagher said.
Zaff said his wife, Susie, heard the car’s screeching tires as it zoomed past their house several times going back and forth to the Full Moon Resort in Big Indian, where the wedding reception had just taken place.
“The road comes up and banks to the left. They lost contact and kept going straight off the right side of the road. They hit that big maple there, flipped in the air 75 to 100 feet [away] and landed upside down,” Zaff said.
He said he went out to the wreck while his wife called 911.
“It was terrible. I ran down and it was a four-door Maserati upside down, the entire roof was crushed,” he recalled.
Colangelo and Martinez were already dead, he said.
When first responders arrived a few minutes later, Kalina emerged from the mangled wreck, bloodied and dazed.
He was flown to Albany Medical Center with a head injury, cops said.
At the hospital Monday afternoon, his mother, Catherine, told The Post that he was “doing OK.”
“It’s a horrible tragedy. That is all we have to say,” she said.
Colangelo and Berger’s neighbors were stunned, saying she had been looking forward to their big day for years, while he had been working overtime to pay for it.
“Tragic, on his wedding night, to get killed,” said Chuck Weindorf, 85, who retired as a Nassau County cop in 1991. “She waited so long and for this to happen, it’s just tragic.”
The couple was planning to honeymoon in Costa Rica.
“Half our trip will be spent exploring the gorgeous rainforests while the other half will be spent soaking up the sun and enjoying the beach,” they wrote on Honeyfund, a Web site where brides and grooms ask loved ones to donate toward a honeymoon instead of buying traditional homewares.
As a K-9 cop, Colangelo was in charge of an explosives-sniffing dog named Jimbo, whom he brought home with him every night, neighbors recalled.
“I’m sure they are going to miss [the officer] in the department,” Weindorf said.
Martinez had a 10-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son, law-enforcement sources said.
He met Colangelo while working in the Emergency Service Unit but had recently moved to the 84th Precinct in Downtown Brooklyn, where he worked for the detective squad, sources said.
Officers at the precinct were taking the loss “very hard,” the Rev. Michael Lopez, a department chaplain, told The Post after consoling the cops Monday.
“He was a great guy, a great upstanding guy, and they all love him,” Lopez said.