Ali Winston

These men, and 13 others, each showed up at a house in Bergen County, New Jersey, earlier this month, where they expected to meet an underage boy or girl they had been talking to online.

Instead, they were met at the house by police officers.

The teacher, the police officer and the minister were among the men from New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania who were arrested during a weeklong sting operation aimed at catching people seeking sexual encounters online with underage teenagers.

State and federal investigators created fake profiles on popular dating and chat platforms — such as Kik, MeetMe and Skout — and posed as teenagers. The officers identified themselves in online chats as 14- or 15-year-old boys and girls.

They were contacted by the 16 men, who in some cases sent explicit photographs. Prosecutors said the men were attempting to arrange sexual encounters. The men then agreed to go to a house in Bergen County, where they expected to find the young people they had contacted at home alone.

The investigation followed virtually the same playbook as an operation in September, during which a police sergeant, a firefighter and a nurse were apprehended.

“I hate to say this, but if we extended that op on a weekly basis, we’d pick up at least 16 defendants a week,” the New Jersey attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, said at a news conference Wednesday.

The men arrested in the recent sting operation faced a range of charges in New Jersey, including attempted sexual assault on a minor, luring, possession of child pornography and attempted debauching the morals of a child.

The other defendants ranged in age from 26 to 55 and included drivers for two ride-share companies, an executive for an internet service provider, a bank branch office manager, a barbershop owner, a dental hygienist and two takeout food deliverymen.

The defendants were formally charged last week and all but one were released after detention hearings. They have been ordered to use the internet only for work purposes and are barred from unsupervised contact with minors.

Investigators said children can be susceptible to sexual predators online. Many gaming, chat and dating apps lack safeguards to keep children from being contacted surreptitiously by people seeking to lure them into sexual encounters, even while in the company of their parents.

“When we think back to the luring of subjects in playgrounds with a puppy or candy, it is a totally different ballgame now, with the advent of the internet and with these apps that make it so easy for predators to prey on our most vulnerable,” Col. Patrick J. Callahan, the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, said.

The state police were helped in the sting by agents from the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations.

None of the apps used by investigators during this investigation have age verification features, the attorney general said. The officers also used popular games, such as “Fortnite” and “Minecraft,” and the gaming chat platform Discord.

“It’s incumbent on app developers to do more to ensure that those apps are used by age-appropriate customers,” Grewal said.

One of the men arrested, Luis Gonzalez Palacio of Weehawken, New Jersey, had more than 13,000 files of child pornography on his computer when he was taken into custody, the state police said.

Investigators said they are examining electronic devices seized from the defendants, and more charges will be brought if they find illegal sexual content.

Another man caught during the operation, Jason Keizer of Garfield, New Jersey, was awaiting sentencing in Bergen County on an earlier charge of possession of child pornography, and a judge ordered him detained on Wednesday pending trial, officials said. Keizer was one of the individuals who showed up to the house used by law enforcement to lure would-be predators.

Tuchol, the police officer from Ridgewood, was arrested on April 15 at the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office in Hackensack, even though he had shown up to the sting location expecting to meet a 15-year-old girl, according to authorities.

In addition to child exploitation charges, Tuchol was also charged with possession of anabolic steroids and drug paraphernalia. He has since been suspended from the Ridgewood Police Department. The social media profiles he used that were uncovered during the investigation featured a photograph of himself in uniform.

“I’m deeply concerned and I’m deeply disappointed that people in positions of trust are part of the defendants in this case,” Grewal said.

Tuchol’s attorney, Richard Potter, said his client is “a man of great character” and a “terrific officer” who has been commended by the Ridgewood Police Department since becoming an officer four years ago. He declined to comment on the allegations against his client, who he said has pleaded not guilty.

Roth’s attorney, Samuel Braverman, declined to comment on the charges against his client, who has been suspended from his job as a teacher at the High School of Computers and Technology in the Bronx.

Keizer and Arroyo could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday and their lawyers did not respond to messages left by a reporter.

The purpose of these sting operations, Callahan said, is to put fear and doubt into the minds of people would are tempted to use cyberspace to lure children into sexual encounters.

“If they think they’re talking to a 14-year-old girl or boy, I hope in the back of their mind they think they’re talking to a New Jersey state trooper or an investigator in a prosecutor’s office,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/nyregion/underage-dating-sting-operation.html" id="6602d587-5db2-3d74-af83-234b6fce0a34">The New York Times</a>.

Kevin Roth is a high school teacher in New York. Peter Tuchol Jr. is a police officer from a suburban New Jersey town. Roger Arroyo is a traveling minister from Philadelphia.

They Arranged to Meet Underage Teens for Sex. Instead the Police Were Waiting

An ax covered in blood was recovered from a trash compactor in the housing development, the New York Police Department said, although it was not immediately clear if it was used in the attacks.

A 21-year-old woman had called for an Uber outside the Bushwick Houses complex around 1:30 a.m. Saturday, police said. The driver saw she was bleeding heavily from cuts to her head and stomach and called 911.

While she was being taken to Elmhurst Hospital Center, the woman told emergency medical workers that she had been attacked by her former boyfriend and that her daughter and a female friend were still in her eighth-floor apartment, police said.

Police officers arriving at the apartment discovered a grisly scene: a partially decapitated woman on the floor, with some of her fingers severed and multiple stab wounds. Police identified the woman as 20-year-old Savannah Rivera.

A 4-year-old girl was found unharmed in a rear bedroom, police said. The child was taken to Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center for evaluation. The wounded woman was in serious condition Saturday night, officials said.

Police were questioning a person of interest, said Deputy Chief Michael Kemper, the commanding officer of Brooklyn North Detectives. He said that what happened was a “terrible, vicious attack” that left both victims with deep lacerations.

The person of interest was a 24-year-old man who previously had a romantic relationship with the wounded woman, a police official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the case.

Kemper told reporters at a briefing that both women knew the person being questioned by police but he declined to elaborate.

Rivera was the mother of a 4-year-old boy and lived at a low-rise public housing development not far from the Bushwick Houses.

In an interview at her family’s apartment, which was decorated for Easter with colored plastic eggs hanging from the vestibule ceiling, her older sister, Tatiana Cabrera, remembered Rivera as “a very quiet girl” who “liked to party.”

About a year ago, Cabrera said, her sister began hanging around the wounded woman.

“Me and her had problems for years,” Cabrera said, referring to the wounded woman, who had not been publicly identified. “I told Savannah that her downfall would be this girl. I told her to stop hanging out with her.”

Rivera’s relatives said that her mother died in 2009 and that Rivera and two of her sisters were raised by their grandmother.

The grandmother, Elsa Collazo, said that when she learned of the killing, “I wanted to die.”

Rivera’s son sat on a couch, happily playing a video game. His fifth birthday, his grandmother said, will be April 30.

“When he is old enough, I will tell him about his mother,” Collazo said. “She was a good mother.”

Outside the red brick building where the attack took place, residents reacted with a mix of shock and resignation.

Rochelle McGee, a resident of another building in the Bushwick Houses who works with a local anti-violence intervention group, said she learned about the killing on Facebook.

Renee Hamilton, who lives on the 16th floor of the building where the attack took place, recognized the wounded woman in a photograph.

“I ride the elevator with her in the morning when she takes her little daughter to school,” Hamilton said. “I’m going to pray for her.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/nyregion/ax-murderer-brooklyn.html" id="52543c41-59ab-3c87-ae5c-93be60625bef">The New York Times</a>.

Bloody Ax Recovered at Homicide Scene in Brooklyn, Police Say

NEW YORK — Police on Saturday were investigating the gruesome killing of a woman in a Brooklyn public housing development in an attack that left another woman seriously injured.

The man, Marc Gomez, 36, of Yonkers, New York, was arrested at 10:30 a.m. Saturday in lower Manhattan, police said. Gomez was identified this week by an anonymous tipster who said he often hung around areas of lower Manhattan. Gomez was charged with felony assault.

The attack, which took place about 3 a.m. March 10, surfaced this week when a video of the assault was posted to the internet. The recording of the attack had received more than 10 million views as of Saturday afternoon.

The video showed a tall man wearing jeans, glasses, a leather jacket and a knit cap forcefully kicking the woman at least six times as she sat on a northbound No. 2 train that was pulling into the Nereid Avenue station. Bystanders recorded the encounter and shouted but did not intervene. It was not clear what preceded the attack.

As the man made his way off the train, he turned to the passengers recording and said, “WorldStar that” — a reference to a popular website that often showcases clips of violent altercations.

The woman was met by an ambulance at the next train station, and treated for swelling and cuts to the face, police said.

While crime in the subway — and the city — is at lows not seen since the 1950s, violent encounters in the transit system posted to social media receive outsized attention. One such attack was the murder of 20-year-old Abel Mosso by rival gang members on a Queens subway platform last month.

As of March 17, there were 465 reported crimes in the transit system, down from 476 during the same period in 2018.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/nyregion/man-kicking-woman-subway-arrested.html" id="86b04a69-5d89-32ad-abad-6c5ef72cafae">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — A man has been taken into police custody in connection with a brutal attack on a 78-year-old woman on the subway in the Bronx this month, New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said in a tweet Saturday.

Man Charged in Subway Attack on 78-Year-Old Woman That Was Caught on Video, Police Say

The snowfall is expected to be accompanied by a cold snap across much of the central and eastern regions of the country. Temperatures in the Midwest were forecast to be 20 to 30 degrees below normal, with wind chills forecast to reach minus 55 in the Northern Plains.

Dangerously frigid conditions were expected in a broad swath of the central United States, from Montana to Wisconsin and through the Texas Panhandle.

On average, temperatures will be 20 to 48 degree below average from the Northern Plains into the Central Plains, according to the National Weather Service. In January, Chicago was gripped by subzero temperatures for days, reaching minus 22 on Jan. 30.

The weather system is expected to bring the heaviest snow to Colorado. In New York, the Weather Service said it was expecting 3 to 7 inches of snow Sunday night into Monday morning.

Other parts of the country have experienced significant snowfall this winter. In Minnesota, the Twin Cities received 39 inches of snow last month, the most that region has ever had in February. The temperature is expected to reach only 2 in Minneapolis on Sunday. The region’s average low for that day is 19.

In Montana, the Weather Service issued a warning over a dangerously low wind chill that could plummet as low as minus 40.

In Colorado Springs, 4 to 8 inches of snow were expected Saturday, with up to 3 feet forecast for the mountains. In some mountainous parts of the state, heavy snowfall caused dangerous driving conditions. Video posted to Twitter showed traffic at a standstill on Interstate 70 near Silver Plume, Colorado, in near-whiteout conditions.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/nyregion/snowstorm-cold-weather.html" id="d5a614aa-a1f5-3739-a071-ce2c74b3dc4e">The New York Times</a>.

New Yorkers woke up Saturday to snow that quickly turned to slush — a harbinger of a much larger weather system that is expected to bring more snow to New York and up to 10 inches to New England starting Sunday night, according to forecasts.

Snow and Extreme Cold Forecast for Large Swath of the U.S.

Montana, the Weather Service issued a warning over a dangerously low wind chill that could plummet as low as minus 40.

The boy, Samuel Joseph, was a sophomore at the High School for Youth and Community Development on the Erasmus Hall campus and one of eight siblings from a family of Haitian immigrants. He was leaving his apartment building to get something to eat around 5:45 p.m. when he was confronted in the lobby by the gunman.

He was shot in the face, head and chest, and died at a nearby hospital, the police said.

His killing was the latest in an increasingly violent year in New York City, and Brooklyn in particular. As of Feb. 17, there had been 48 homicides in the city this year, up from 31 during the same period in 2018.

That increase has been driven mostly by killings in Brooklyn, where there have been at least 15 more homicides compared with this point last year.

Surveillance video recovered by the police from nearby businesses showed two young men stopping and speaking to one of Samuel’s sisters in front of their building, Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte, a Democrat whose district includes the neighborhood, said Saturday.

“His sister was walking down the street, and you can see these two men have a conversation with her and apparently asked where her brother was,” said Bichotte, who had spoken to one of Samuel’s sisters and watched the video. “One guy stood outside, and one came inside, did the shooting and left.”

No arrests have been made and a motive for the shooting was not immediately clear.

“This was planned, but I don’t know if it was the right target,” Bichotte said.

The shooting happened on a busy Friday evening when the neighboring businesses — a barbershop, a tattoo parlor, a package shipping center — were full of customers.

Fabian Mora, a tattoo artist who works two doors down from Samuel’s building, said that for the past few years Samuel would come into his shop and watch people get tattooed. “He used to joke with us and say, ‘I want to get a tattoo,’ and we would tell him he was too young,” Mora said.

Frank Joseph, who played basketball with Samuel at the YMCA gym just steps down the street, crouched in front of a sidewalk memorial of candles and a note-laden poster of his friend. He remembered him as a skilled point guard.

“I knew him before he could even speak English,” said Joseph, who was not related to the victim. “He was a good kid.”

A number of youth homicides have stunned the city recently, notably the brutal stabbing of Lesandro Guzman-Feliz in the Bronx last summer and the shooting of Oluwadurotimi Joseph Oyebola on a Brooklyn basketball court in September.

Samuel’s family — he was one of five sons and three daughters — came to the United States about 10 years ago. Relatives were too distraught to speak to reporters Saturday.

“They came here for opportunity, and a young man was gunned down,” Bichotte, the assemblywoman, said. “You have a family that’s trying to capture the American dream, and then something like this happens.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/nyregion/flatbush-shooting-samuel-joseph.html" id="22dbb8e3-7315-3b19-af63-7224aa6c7354">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — A 15-year-old boy from Haiti was shot and killed in front of his sister by a hooded gunman Friday night in a horrific scene that rocked his Brooklyn neighborhood and served as a grim reminder of a growing number of homicides in New York.

Shooting Death of a Teenager in Brooklyn Comes Amid Rise in Killings

The murder was the first killing on the subway in more than a year.

Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said the killing stemmed from a feud between rival Central American gangs in Queens.

The victim, Abel Mosso, 20, had been identified by investigators as a member of the 18th Street gang, he said. The gunman is a known MS-13 gang member, Shea said.

Though Shea did not name him, the man taken into custody was Ramiro Gutierrez, a law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open case. Gutierrez and 11 others were charged in December by the Queens district attorney with conspiracy and attempted murder, as well as drug and weapons charges. He was freed on $2,500 bail awaiting trial.

Gutierrez was being questioned by detectives Monday evening. The district attorney had yet to file charges against him in Sunday’s killing.

The shooting, which was caught on video by a bystander, occurred around 12:45 p.m. Sunday. A fight broke out on a crowded 7 train bound for Manhattan and spilled out onto the platform at the 90th Street-Elmhurst Avenue station in Elmhurst.

In the video footage, three men can be seen wrestling on the ground. One man gets to his feet and points what appears to be a small revolver at Mosso. Five to six shots ring out, as bystanders scream and run for cover.

Mosso was shot several times in the face and died at the scene, police said.

Photographs of a man resembling Gutierrez, taken from security cameras near the subway station, were circulated by police, and witnesses identified him to detectives. The gun was not found.

Police were still seeking a second man filmed by security cameras as he fled the subway station wearing a gray sweatshirt and covering his face with a scarf.

The rivalry between MS-13 and 18th Street goes back decades to their origins in Los Angeles. Both gangs later established criminal operations in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, among other places. They view each other as mortal enemies.

MS-13 has been active in New York City and the surrounding region for over a decade, and remains a persistent threat despite several rounds of indictments by local and federal authorities. In December, five accused MS-13 members lured a 23-year-old man, Ian Cruz, to a bird sanctuary in Queens, where he was shot to death.

The 18th Street gang is a newer arrival to New York, but has begun to target its longtime rivals, police said. In May, the Queens district attorney indicted seven men accused of being 18th Street members in the murder of an MS-13 rival.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/nyregion/subway-shooting-ms13-gang.html" id="5371115c-bcaa-3238-a191-ce576a74c858">The New York Times</a>.

MS-13 Member Is Arrested in Fatal Shooting at Queens Subway Station, Police Say

NEW YORK — A 26-year-old man who police said is a member of the violent MS-13 street gang was arrested Monday in connection with the brazen murder of a gang rival on a Queens subway platform the previous day.

Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said the killing stemmed from a feud between rival gangs. The victim, Abel Mosso, 20, was believed to be a member of the 18th Street gang, he said.

The gunman, whom police did not immediately identify, had been charged in December by the Queens district attorney in a gang conspiracy case, and is a known member of MS-13, a Salvadoran street gang, police said.

“Gang incidents within transit are extremely rare,” Shea said. “When you have an incident like this, you’re going to get the full might and fury of the NYPD.”

The shooting, which was caught on video by a bystander, occurred around 12:45 p.m. Sunday, after a fight on a crowded 7 train bound for Manhattan spilled out onto the platform at the 90th Street-Elmhurst Avenue station in the Elmhurst neighborhood.

NEW YORK — A 26-year-old man who police say is a member of the violent MS-13 street gang was arrested Monday in connection with a brazen murder on a Queens subway platform the previous day.

The chaotic confrontation, between the police officers and two men, has prompted an Internal Affairs investigation about whether excessive force was used, police officials said.

The beating, the police said, came after two transit officers had an altercation with two men they had asked to leave the entrance of a nearby subway station.

The two men, Sidney Williams, 37, and Aaron Grissom, 36, were arrested on charges of felony assault and other offenses, and treated at a hospital, police officials said. Two of the officers had minor injuries.

According to police officials, several commuters had complained about the men smoking in an entrance to the A, C and 1 trains at 169th Street on Broadway.

The transit officers spent five minutes trying to persuade the men to move away from the area, and then one of the men threw a punch at one of the officers, which was not captured on the video, the officials said.

Michael Gonzalez, a bystander, said he saw the two men physically accost the officers and began filming the incident, which took place on 169th Street in Washington Heights.

Gonzalez said a taller man with dreadlocks, whom the police identified as Grissom, tried to shove or grab an officer with a shaved head.

“I don’t know what he was thinking” Gonzalez said. “What did he think, the officer was going to back away?”

In the video, the shaven-headed officer flicks open an extendible baton and strikes Williams, the shorter of the two men, twice over the head. Another officer wearing a watch cap takes a backhanded swing at Williams, striking him in the face.

A woman off-camera can be heard saying in Spanish, “They were telling them to move away from there, and they didn’t want to. The two of them squared with the police.”

The video shows Grissom chasing one of the officers down 169th Street; they grapple and fall to the ground. Other uniformed and plainclothes officers rush to join the fight, kicking and striking Grissom with fists and batons.

One baton strike appears to catch Grissom flush in the face, dazing him, the video shows. The shaven-headed officer strikes Grissom multiple times with a baton while he is pinned to the ground. One of the plainclothes officers can be seen repeatedly kicking Grissom in the torso.

Police officials confirmed that two detectives and an off-duty police officer came to the assistance of the two transit officers. The Police Department did not identify the officers involved. None have been placed on modified duty.

Grissom and Williams were arrested at least once before, on Dec. 5, in an attack on two transit officers. The officers had told them not to loiter in the mezzanine area in the same station, court records show.

In that incident, Grissom threw a punch at a transit officer, and Williams swung a wooden bat at a second officer, according to a criminal complaint. The men were charged with resisting arrest, attempted assault and possession of about two dozen bags of synthetic marijuana.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, speaking to reporters Wednesday at an unrelated news conference at City Hall, said the video raised disturbing questions for the police.

“If people are on the ground, and yet there’s still physical action being taken, that concerns me,” he said.

Still, the mayor said, Grissom and Williams bore the blame for starting the conflict, and he noted that the police investigation into the beating was not finished.

Grissom, who lives in the Bronx, faces charges of assault, resisting arrest, menacing and other offenses, the police said. Williams, of Brooklyn, faces charges of assault, resisting arrest and aggravated harassment.

Both men were treated at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s for pain and bruising. Williams has a nose injury, police officials said.

One of the officers involved in the melee has chipped teeth and a knee injury, the police said, and another has a hand injury.

Grissom and Williams had not yet been arraigned on criminal charges, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/nyregion/nypd-beating-men-washington-heights.html" id="6662d3e8-ef64-3af0-ac3b-d3fd0537c8cc">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Several police officers pummeled a man in the middle of a street in Upper Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon with their batons, fists and feet, according to a witness who took a video of the incident.

Video Shows Police Officers Beating Men on Manhattan Street in Wild Melee

The chaotic confrontation, between the police officers and two men, has prompted a departmental review about whether excessive force was used, police officials said.

The beating, the police said, came after one of the men had accosted a transit officer who was responding to complaints about a group of men smoking in a nearby subway stairwell.

The two men were arrested on charges of felony assault and other offenses and treated at a hospital, police officials said. Two of the officers were injured.

According to police officials, several commuters had complained about the men — Sidney Williams, 37, and Aaron Grissom, 36 — smoking in an entrance to the A, C and 1 trains at 169th Street on Broadway. When the officers told the men to move from the area, one of them threw a punch at an officer that was not captured in the video, officials said.

The man who shot the video, Michael Gonzalez, said the two men physically accosted the officers, at which point he began filming the incident on 169th Street in Washington Heights.

Gonzalez said one of the men, a taller man with dreadlocks whom the police identified as Grissom, tried to shove or grab a shaven-headed officer.

“I don’t know what he was thinking,” Gonzalez said. “What did he think, the officer was going to back away?”

Chaos mounted as Grissom tried to intervene and chased an officer down 169th Street; the officer tackled him to the ground.

The video shows uniformed officers and men in plainclothes — also apparently officers — rushing to the scene, and the shaven-headed officer striking Grissom multiple times while he is pinned to the ground.

The officers pile on, kicking and striking him with fists and batons. One baton strike appears to catch Grissom flush in the face, dazing him.

The Police Department has not identified the officers involved.

Grissom and Williams have not yet been arraigned on criminal charges, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

The bullets struck the sidewalk. They struck parked cars. They gouged holes in the brick walls of the apartment buildings on Loring Place North, in the University Heights neighborhood. Fragments from one bullet tore into the leg of a 12-year-old girl. Another bullet hit Irene Ureña Perez, 46, in the belly as she walked a small child home.

“I was leaving the building and heard the shots, tan tan tan tan tan!” said Perez, who was released from the hospital last week after three operations but remains on bed rest and will probably need more surgery. “I came to this country to work, and now I’m disabled.”

Gomez managed to wound the fleeing gunman in the neck and one foot, stopping him. It was only luck the wild shootout did not lead to the death of bystanders.

The gunfight illustrated the gulf between what officers are trained to do and what can happen when they come under fire and adrenaline starts pumping, experts on police firearms tactics said. Losing control or acting recklessly in such situations can have devastating consequences.

Assistant Chief Patrick Conry, a spokesman for the department, said the shooting was legally justified but was being investigated to determine if Gomez followed the department’s guidelines for using force. He remains on active duty.

Several experts on police tactics, however, said the officer did not follow his training.

“What you’ve got here are 27 rounds of hot lead in one of the most densely populated places in the country,” said Roger Clark, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s lieutenant who often testifies as an expert witness about police use of force.

“That’s just wild fire. When you shoot, you shoot with precision, in twos or threes, and then assess the situation. If you’re running and just capping off rounds wildly, that’s forbidden.”

John C. Cerar, a former deputy inspector who commanded the New York Police Department’s firearms and tactics section, said the way Gomez shot while running was an anomaly in New York City, where officers are trained to control their fire.

“We tried to get police officers to be realistic that you’re better off firing from cover,” he said. “Less shots have to be fired if you’re in a good position. Shot placement is so much more important than the amount of shots fired.”

Anthony Bell, 55, witnessed the shootout from the window of his apartment on Loring Place North and called 911. The street, a mix of rowhouses and prewar apartment buildings, is often full of people, as it was that night, including children, Bell said.

“If this had been summertime, a lot more people would’ve gotten hurt,” he said. “They could’ve just followed him, surrounded the block, don’t let him get out of eyesight, and then you pick him up.”

Before the shooting, Gomez and his partner, Brandon Gembecki, were patrolling nearby on West 183rd Street in plainclothes and an unmarked car, and stopped when they spotted an illegally parked car, Conry said. Residents said the block was well-known as an open-air drug market.

The officers were from the Field Intelligence Unit of the 52nd Precinct, which gathers information about gangs, drug dealing and guns, often helping detectives with information from confidential informants.

Shortly before 6 p.m., the two officers saw Edwin Castillo-Concepcion, 37, run by with his face covered, clutching a red backpack. He had just held two men up in a building lobby on West 183rd Street, firing a shot at them and taking the backpack, according to a criminal complaint.

Gomez, who was wearing a dark knit cap, a blue jacket and jeans, got out of the car and ran after him. Castillo-Concepcion turned at the corner of West 183rd Street and Loring Place North and fired a .25-caliber pistol, missing the officer.

Gomez opened up with his gun as he turned the corner and ran down the long, sloping street, according to security camera footage obtained by Channel 2 News. He had never fired his weapon in five years on the force, the police said.

He emptied an entire 16-round magazine, striking at least five parked cars on both sides of the street.

“It almost seemed like every step he took, he took a shot,” Bell said, adding that he thought he was witnessing a gunfight between civilians.

At some point, Castillo-Concepcion fired a second shot at Gomez.

Gomez loaded a fresh magazine into his Glock pistol while Gembecki radioed for help and reversed the car down West 183rd Street. Gomez fired 11 more times at Castillo-Concepcion, who fell wounded outside a bar on West Fordham Road. Two kilograms of cocaine were found in the backpack, and the pistol was near him.

The officers did not activate their body cameras during the incident. Castillo-Concepcion faces charges of attempted murder and assault on an officer. The Bronx district attorney’s office is also investigating Gomez’s conduct in the shooting.

Perez, a native of the Dominican Republic who moved to New York only three months ago, has given notice she will sue the city, seeking $10 million in damages. The wounded 12-year-old, Gabriella Hayes, was released from the hospital last week.

Cerar, the former police deputy inspector, said the shots Castillo-Concepcion fired at Gomez may have changed the officer’s calculation about whether letting him flee would put lives in danger.

Still, Eric Adams, a former police captain who is the Brooklyn borough president, said Gomez’s actions, though heroic, had put an alarming number of people in harm’s way.

“The goal of a police encounter is to terminate the threat,” Adams said. “What is often overlooked is that termination sometimes is allowing that guy to get away, to do an investigation and pick him up later.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/nyregion/nypd-shooting-bronx-27-shots.html" id="2a5795ce-5ec3-3555-acb7-bc3645966804">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Twenty-seven shots — almost two full magazines. That is how many times Officer Juan Gomez fired his pistol on Dec. 5 as he sprinted down a crowded Bronx street, chasing an armed man who had shot at him.

An Officer Fired 27 Times at a Fleeing Suspect. Did He Need To?

“Not a big deal,” the lieutenant replied. “We were effecting a lawful arrest.”

Audible gasps were heard as the texts were read aloud Thursday during a police disciplinary hearing for Officer Daniel Pantaleo. He is accused of recklessly using a chokehold that led to Garner’s death after he was detained on the suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes.

The texts and testimony provided unsettling new details in one of the most wrenching cases of suspected police misconduct in New York.

Garner’s dying words “I can’t breathe” — repeated 11 times — set off protests around the country and became a powerful slogan for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The texts between the commander, Lt. Christopher Bannon, and the officer, Sgt. Dhanan Saminath, were revealed for the first time on the fourth day of the hearing for Pantaleo, who faces possible termination.

He has never faced criminal charges. A grand jury on Staten Island declined to indict Pantaleo in 2014. A federal civil rights inquiry has dragged on for years without charges being filed. The statute of limitations expires July 17, the fifth anniversary of Garner’s death.

An independent police watchdog agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, brought the current charges against Pantaleo, which resulted in this week’s hearing.

The evidence at the hearing picked up events from the Police Department’s perspective while Garner — who was at least 6 feet 3 inches tall and had asthma so severe that he quit his job — was lying motionless on the ground on Bay Street near the Staten Island Ferry.

The communications started with Saminath messaging Bannon and telling him that Garner had been wrestled to the ground and then adding, “He’s most likely DOA,” using the acronym for dead on arrival. “He has no pulse,” Saminath wrote.

After acknowledging the message, Bannon wrote his follow-up note, now linking “Not a big deal” with “I can’t breathe” as the two defining quotations from Garner’s death.

“No big deal?” Gwen Carr, Garner’s mother, angrily told reporters outside the Police Department’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, where the hearing was held. “If one of his loved ones was on the ground dead and someone came up to him and said, ‘It’s no big deal,’ how would you feel about it?”

During Monday’s testimony, the supervisor who oversaw the police’s internal review, Deputy Inspector Charles Barton, said that in 2015 he ordered the lead investigator to recommend disciplinary charges against Pantaleo. But the department’s internal prosecution unit never filed charges.

The medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Garner testified Wednesday that the chokehold “set into motion a lethal sequence” that led to the asthma attack that killed him.

Pantaleo’s lawyer, Stuart London, said his client used an approved maneuver, a “seatbelt hold,” that the police had been trained to use in incidents where people act violently or are resisting arrest.

But the commanding officer of the police academy, Deputy Inspector Richard Dee, testified Tuesday that Pantaleo’s actions meet “the definition of a chokehold.” He added that the seatbelt maneuver was neither taught or approved by the department in 2006, when Pantaleo went through the academy, nor in 2008, when he received training to become a plainclothes officer.

London said this week that his client had been a “scapegoat” and added that Garner was in poor health and that he “set these factors in motion by resisting arrest.”

London used the testimony of Bannon, Saminath and two other officers who were involved in the arrest to try to establish that his client was an exemplary officer and that Garner had been resisting arrest.

But the introduction of the text messages under cross-examination by prosecutors from the Civilian Complaint Review Board seemed to damage the defense’s case.

Bannon was pressed by one prosecutor, Suzanne O'Hare, to explain his text message.

“My reasoning,’’ he said, “was not to be malicious. It’s to make sure the officer knew he was put in a bad situation.”

“Would you agree that Eric Garner was put in a bad situation?” O’Hare said.

Bannon hesitated for several seconds. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said.

NEW YORK — A police commander in Staten Island received text messages from one of his officers in July 2014, informing him that a man identified as Eric Garner had been arrested, and was “most likely DOA” after he had been wrestled to the ground.

Ali Winston

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