NEW YORK – A New York Police Department employee was killed and another seriously injured Friday night after answering a domestic nuisance call, according to a law enforcement official.
A suspect was also killed in the Harlem shooting, the official said, who was not authorized to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity.
The official said a call came shortly after 5 p.m. from a mother who needed help with her son. Three officers responded to the ground floor apartment on 135th Street.
They talked to the mother in the front room, then the two officers went into the back room where the son was, and gunshots were heard, the official said.
The officer who died was 22 years old and had been doing the job since November 2020 and the injured officer, 27, had been doing the job for four years, the official said.
Police dispatcher audio captured several scenes of chaos, including one officer shouting for assistance and another notifying the dispatcher that two officers had been shot.
An officer ordered “three buses” or an ambulance to the scene, a six-story apartment building, and police blocked traffic on the route to nearby Harlem Hospital. The building sits on a block between two iconic Harlem avenues: Malcolm X Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Mayor Eric Adams, himself a former police officer, was at the hospital where officers were transported after the shooting, the third time in four days officers have faced firearms while on the job. Inside the hospital entrance, a line of officers stood shoulder to shoulder at the top of several 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 drug detective was shot in the leg on Staten Island.
The last NYPD officer to be shot and killed in the line of duty, Brian Mulkeen, was shot while grappling with an armed man after chasing and shooting him in the Bronx in September 2019.
Mulkeen’s death occurred about seven months after Det. Brian Simonsen was killed by friendly fire while he and other officers were confronting a robbery suspect at a mobile phone shop in Queens.
In 2017, officer Miosotis Familia was ambushed by a gunman as she wrote in a notebook in a mobile command post. In 2016, Sgt. Paul Tuozzolo was killed in a gunfight with a man who had broken into the home of his estranged wife.
In 2015, Officer Randolph Holder was fatally shot by a stolen biker in Manhattan and Officer Brian Moore died after being shot dead by a man in Queens.
Last year, officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were shot dead by an ambush as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn.
Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz of New York and Deepti Hajela of Essex County, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
