COPS SLAM $11M FOR SHOT 'JUNKIE'
A suspected heroin addict with nearly 20 arrests to his name was accused of dragging a cop along a Bronx street while fleeing a car stop, forcing another officer to shoot him — and a jury just handed him $11 million, The Post has learned.
Raoul Lopez took the city to court over the 2006 run-in that left him partially paralyzed on his right side, and was awarded the eightfigure payday by a Bronx jury on Tuesday, infuriating law-enforcement insiders.
“It’s not surprising in light of the anti-police climate that has been fostered between the Ferguson, Missouri, case and the Eric Garner case,” said Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association. “A police officer was dragged by a car and we pay the person who did it? Something is wrong with society.”
Lopez, 27 when the encounter happened, was in the midst of “a two-week-long bender” and had just scored his latest fix on Feb. 1, 2006, when he rolled through a stop sign at East 169th Street and Grand Concourse, a city lawyer wrote in papers filed in the Bronx Supreme Court case.
Sgt. Philippe Blanchard and Officer Zinos Konstantinides pulled over Lopez’s Honda shortly before noon and ordered him to kill the engine, but he refused to comply, according to the filings.
Instead, when Konstantinides reached inside the car to make a grab for the keys, Lopez hit the gas, dragging the cop into traffic along bustling Grand Concourse, the documents said.
Fearing “that his partner would be maimed or killed if he did not take immediate, forceful action,” Blanchard fired a single shot, striking Lopez in the neck, the city wrote in the papers.
The wound left Lopez in Lincoln Hospital with a litany of injuries detailed across 2¹/2 typed pages in his own lawyer’s filing, including partial paralysis to the right side of his body.
But Lopez fared better in court, winning an acquittal on a criminal assault charge, while Blanchard’s potentially lifesaving action was deemed “not within department guidelines” in an internal NYPD review.
Lopez — who, according to police sources, has 19 lifetime arrests and, by his own admission in court, “about 13” convictions — won again this week, when the Bronx Supreme Court jury awarded him the big bucks.
His busts include weapons possession, resisting arrest and assault in 2015 — nearly a decade after the incident that hampered his mobility, sources said.
Lopez’s attorney, Brett Klein, had requested the jury award $6 million to $9 million for lost earnings alone — even though Lopez wasn’t employed at the time of the incident, according to the documents.
“He was at first a quadriplegic, and through hard work he has made great progress,” Klein said in a statement. “But the loss of the function of his right arm and other permanent effects of this shooting will be with him for the rest of his life.
“Raoul Lopez was an unarmed motorist who was needlessly shot in the back of his neck during what the police described as a routine traffic stop,” Klein continued.
“We are grateful that a Bronx jury has held the city accountable for this wrongful shooting.”
The lawyer also denied his client dragged the cop.
Konstantinides, who has since retired from the NYPD, could not be reached for comment, while Blanchard, still on the job in The Bronx, referred questions to the department’s press office.
The NYPD deferred comment to the city Law Department, which said the case may not be over just yet when asked if an appeal was coming.
“The split-second response by an officer likely stopped this driver from dragging an officer to his death, a response we believe was justified under the circumstances,” spokesman Nicholas Paolucci said in a statement.
“We strongly disagree with this verdict and are reviewing the city’s legal options.”