Cops blast gunman on video
Suspect pointed weapon at several Bronx officers & then was shot dead
A dramatic video of the deadly police-involved shooting in the Bronx on Friday shows a man running with his pistol raised when he was fatally shot by cops.
The 51-year-old Staten Island man, who served five years in state prison on a 1988 assault conviction, has not officially been identified, but the Daily News obtained an exclusive video that shows the moment he was gunned down by police.
The footage begins as the stocky suspect stalks around the bed of his pickup truck which appears to be parked in the crosswalk at Seneca and Hunts Point Aves. in Hunts Point.
NYPD officials say police working on a separate investigation in the area overheard a dispute between the slain man and another party erupt on the street at about 7 p.m. on Friday night.
“F—k you, F—k, you, I’m going to get my gun,” police sources claim the man said before retrieving a black handgun from his truck.
This is the point where the video picks up the action. The man emerges from his truck carrying a black handgun that turned out to be a Byrna HD airsoft pistol in his right hand.
“For all intents and purposes it looks like a semi-automatic firearm,” Assistant Chief Phillip Rivera, the Bronx borough patrol commander, said Friday night.
The man starts motioning to someone behind him who is out of the frame on the other side of the truck.
Police said that the other person in the argument also threatened to get a gun, but never came back to the scene. Detectives are looking to question that man.
In the video, the 5-foot-9, 190-pound man is wearing a black crewneck sweatshirt, black pants and boots as he walks onto the curb toward the front of Boogie Down Grind, a coffee house at 868 Hunts Point Ave.
He walks past the cafe’s outdoor dining shed and motions to his left at something inside the shop.
Rivera said that the man walked toward an officer who told him “Police, don’t move!”
In the recording, as he goes out of the frame to the left, a cop with his weapon drawn comes from the top right around the outdoor dining structure. The officer, who was wearing a jacket with “POLICE” emblazoned on the chest, appears to be talking into his police radio.
The restaurant structure blocks the two men from seeing each other.
As the officer walks onto the sidewalk he raises his pistol and the man with the air gun comes back into the frame with his gun raised in a two-handed grip, pointed away from the officer at another cop who is out of view down the sidewalk.
Police officials say that man fired one shot from his air pistol at the officer who ordered him to drop his weapon, narrowly missing the cop’s head.
As the man spins quickly toward the other officer who is about 15 feet behind him, his weapon is still raised, the video shows. He begins to run toward the cop, who backs up around the sidewalk shed with his gun trained on the man the whole time. It’s then that the officer appears to open fire at the man and the cafe’s front window.
“Both officers returned fire, striking the suspect several times in the torso,” Rivera said.
The suspect takes three steps before he pitches forward and sprawls facedown on the sidewalk. He shoves the gun away from him as he lies there.
Cops walk over to the motionless man, but keep their guns trained on the person off-camera, beside the pickup truck, the video shows.
Witnesses said that they saw cops performing first aid on the man before he was taken to Lincoln Hospital, where he died.
The suspect has a string of arrests, beginning with his assault conviction in 1988 and spanning the 1990s and 2000s, for burglary, robbery, reckless endangerment, patronizing prostitutes and weapons charges.
Most recently he was arrested for a third-degree menacing last year.