MOM SHOT AT JFK INN
Struck in chest after punks rob & pistol-whip daughter
A FEARLESS 53-year-old woman was shot in the chest after trying to fight off two men who robbed her daughter at gunpoint Thursday night at a hotel near Kennedy Airport, sources and police said.
The woman was inside the Hampton Inn on 135th Ave., in South Ozone Park, shortly before 8:30 p.m. and had left her daughter waiting in a car in the parking area in front of the hotel, cops said, with the investigation still unfolding.
A family member confirmed the victim as Andrea Koller of Towson, Md., but did not want to comment on the situation.
The daughter, whose name and age were not immediately released, was sitting in the passenger seat of the car when one of the gun-wielding robbers opened the driver’s side door, pistol-whipped her and took her jewelry.
Koller was walking out of the 13-story hotel — part of a row of five hotels near the Belt Parkway opposite the airport — as the thieves were about to make their getaway, cops said.
She confronted them and was shot once in the chest, sources said.
The pair fled in a white car, CBS2 reported.
The shooting happened to the right of the main entrance of the hotel where the driveway leads past a small garden.
Residents who live across the street from the hotel complex said they heard a commotion in the parking area of the hotel complex before a single shot rang out.
“We heard screaming and heard a gunshot, then the ambulances showed up,” a neighbor said. “We didn’t know what it was, then we heard the shot.”
Koller was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital in critical condition, an FDNY spokesman said.
“They took her out. Then everyone started coming,” the neighbor said. “We just heard a shot and somebody was screaming. We didn’t know what it was then we heard the shot.”
Public records show that a woman of the same name works as a teacher for the Baltimore City Public School system.
A LinkedIn page indicates that she teaches English to nonnative speakers.
In 2013, the Baltimore Sun published a letter to the editor written by a woman named Andrea Koller from Towson, Md., railing agaisnst gun violence and the gun show loophole that allows criminals to easily acquire weapons.
“We cannot cling to the naïve belief that we are safe merely because someone runs a background check on a gun buyer,” Koller wrote. “Guns change hands and the simple truth is, more guns in more hands means more gun-based crimes.”
There were no arrests as of late Friday and police were still investigating the incident.