'Cop killer should die in jail!'
Police-kin fury at parole for another ’70s radical
Another Black Liberation Army cop killer will walk out of prison a free man, thanks again to parole-board members appointed by Gov. Cuomo.
Robert Hayes, who killed a transit cop in a Bronx subway-platform shootout in 1973 — and later tried to blow away five officers with a sawedoff shotgun — will be sprung as soon as next month, officials said.
Transit patrolman and father-oftwo Sidney Thompson, 37, lost his life for merely trying to arrest the then-23-year-old Hayes and a second BLA member for jumping a turnstile.
Sentenced to 35 years to life in 1974 — before state law mandated life without parole for cop killers — Hayes will get out as early as July 24, The Post has learned.
“It just broke my heart,” Thompson’s widow, Joyce, 68, told The Post of receiving a letter informing her that her husband’s killer was being released.
“My husband was killed because he stopped somebody from jumping a turnstile,” she added.
“My husband was killed for 15 cents.”
Just two months ago, on April 27, former BLA member and three-time cop killer Herman Bell, 70, was sprung on parole after serving 47 years of his 25-years-to-life sentence for the ambush murder of two NYPD officers.
Two other NYPD cop killers, Eddie Matos and Anthony Bottom, were due for parole hearings.
“The buck has to stop somewhere, because right now the parole board seems to think they are only accountable to the criminals themselves,” railed Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch, who has slammed the Cuomo administration for filling the board with cop-killer coddlers.
A spokesman for the Governor’s Office stated that Cuomo has said, effectively, that his hands were tied.
“This is an independent board, but we disagree with this decision in the strongest possible terms,” said Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi.
Of the state’s 12 parole-board members, 10 were appointed by Cuomo.
They include the two who voted to free Bell, and the two — Erik Berliner and Ellen Evans Alexander — who voted to spring Hayes.
The one dissenting board member opposing the Hayes parole, Joseph Crangle, was appointed by former Gov. David Paterson in 2008.
A spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which handles parole, stressed that the board “is an independent body and all of its members have been confirmed by the state Senate.”
The decision outraged Thompson’s son, Steven, 51.
“So what does this mean — if you killed a cop and you live long enough, you’re gonna get out?”
“He should die in jail,” Steven said of Hayes, the man who shot his father in the head, neck and chest in a broad-daylight confrontation at the 174th Street station.
Hayes’ atrocities against cops didn’t end on the platform.
The avowed cop hater would go underground for almost four months. And when five officers caught up with him at a BLA hideout on Bronx Avenue, Hayes opened fire on them with a sawed-off shotgun.
Two cops were wounded in that shootout.
Hayes would take the stand in his own defense, claiming no involvement in the shooting.
But his own sister, a nurse, would tell jurors that Hayes had gone to her for treatment for his wounded arm after the platform shooting — and fessed up to her about killing Sidney Thompson.
“Life means life,” said Steven Thompson of Hayes’ 1974 sentence. “It did for my father,” he added. Steven followed in his father’s footsteps, first with the NYPD, and then,
for the past 28 years, with the Prince William County Police Department in Virginia, where he is a deputy chief.
“It’s all pretty new, pretty fresh,” he said of learning of Hayes’ looming parole. “What can I do?” he said, when asked if he would fight the release.
“If there’s something I can do, I would do it.”
Steven was only 6 years old when his father died a hero — too young to have but the slightest memory of his dad.
“They said he was a joker,” Steven recalled. “My mother told me he was in the Army.”
Steven join the NYPD in 1990, serving also in The Bronx and proudly wearing his father’s shield number, 3801, in Sidney’s memory.
He quit the in 1996, shortly after line-of-duty deaths in March and May of that year of Street Crime Unit Officer Kevin Gillespie, 33, and Officer Vincent Guidice, 27, both in The Bronx.
Steven said he was outraged back then that neither slaying resulted in the death penalty.
“That showed to me that police officers’ lives mean nothing,” he said.
Steven’s sister, Cheryl Medina, 53, of Florida, told The Post she still has nightmares of being 8 years old and saying goodbye to her dying father at Jacobi Hospital.
“It’s not fair that [Hayes] can get out and see his family,” Medina-said Thursday. “My father can only see his family from heaven.”