NEW YORK — Investigators are trying to determine whether police fired any of the shots that injured two officers during a confrontation with an armed motorist who also was wounded, a spokeswoman for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday.
Karen Hinton told The Associated Press that de Blasio is awaiting a police report on the exact sequence of the violent confrontation early Saturday that included a wild police chase through Brooklyn. Police spokesman Stephen Davis said officers fired more than 30 bullets.
It was the second on-duty shooting of multiple officers in the nation’s biggest city this month, police said.
The officers were hit just after 3 a.m. in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood while they and fellow officers confronted a gunman who had earlier pointed his revolver at two other housing police officers who approached him after they heard gunfire at an intersection, Police Commissioner William Bratton said. The gunman then drove off and slammed his car head-on into a marked patrol vehicle.
Several officers converged on the armed driver and fired while he was in his car, Bratton said. Officers William Reddin and Andrew Yurkiw, in plainclothes, were sitting in another vehicle at the scene as the gunfire exploded.
Reddin, shot in the hip, and Yurkiw, who was hit in his bulletproof vest, were in stable condition and expected to recover. Suspect Jamal Funes remained in critical condition with multiple gunshot wounds, Bratton said.
At issue now is whether police may have fired any of the shots that injured their colleagues.
“That has not been determined,” Hinton told the AP. She declined to comment further, saying any other information will come from police officials.
Officers found a .357 Magnum revolver on the front seat of Funes’ car. Authorities say they are trying to determine what prompted his conduct.
It wasn’t clear whether the suspect had an attorney who could comment on his behalf.
The shooting comes about two weeks after Officers Diara Cruz and Patrick Espeut were wounded on patrol in a public housing stairwell by a gunman who police said killed himself soon after. Last month, Officer Sherrod Stuart was wounded in the ankle as another officer exchanged gunfire with a suspect in a Bronx street brawl.
And in October, Officer Randolph Holder was shot and killed by a suspected bicycle thief he was chasing.
