NEW YORK (AP) — A New York Police Department officer was killed and another gravely injured Friday night after responding to a domestic disturbance call, according to a law enforcement official.
A suspect was also killed in the shooting in Harlem, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity.
The official said a call had come in shortly after 5 p.m. of a mother needing help with her son. Three officers responded to the ground floor apartment on 135th Street.
They spoke to the mother in a front room, and then two officers went to a back room where the son was, and shots rang out, the official said.
Police dispatch audio captured some of the chaotic scene, including an officer screaming for assistance and another officer informing the dispatcher that two officers had been shot.
One officer asks for “three buses” or ambulances to the scene, a six-story apartment building, and police to block off traffic on the route to nearby Harlem Hospital. The building is on a block between two iconic Harlem avenues: Malcolm X Boulevard and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.
Mayor Eric Adams was at the hospital where the officers were taken after the shooting, the third time in four days that officers have faced gunfire on the job. Inside the hospital entrance, a line of officers stood shoulder to shoulder at the top of some stairs.
An officer was wounded in the leg Tuesday night in the Bronx during a struggle with a teenager who also shot himself. On Thursday, a narcotics detective was shot in the leg on Staten Island.
The last NYPD officer fatally shot in the line of duty, Brian Mulkeen, was hit by friendly fire while struggling with an armed man after chasing and shooting at him in the Bronx in September 2019.
Mulkeen’s death came about seven months after Det. Brian Simonsen was killed by friendly fire while he and other officers were confronting a robbery suspect at a cell phone store in Queens.
In 2015, a man who’d been riding a stolen bicycle shot and killed Officer Randolph Holder as Holder and his partner approached him on a footbridge over a Manhattan highway.
The year before, Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were fatally shot by a man who ambushed them as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn. The man, whose threatening posts online included a vow to put “wings on pigs” — ran into a subway station and killed himself.
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Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz in New York and Deepti Hajela in Essex County, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
Michael R. Sisak, The Associated Press
