TWO NYPD COPS SHOT IN BROOKLYN

A shootout occurred in in the Bedford-Stuyvesant after Jamal Funes rammed his car head-on into a police car

By Larry Celona, Shawn Cohen and Kathianne Boniello

New York Post
February 20, 2016

Two Brooklyn cops were shot early Saturday in a wild standoff with a man who led them on a car chase before ramming a marked patrol vehicle head-on, sources said.

Police Officer William Reddin was struck in the hip and Police Officer Andrew Yurkiw was hit in his vest at point-blank range, sources told The Post.

Reddin underwent surgery at Kings County Hospital and was in stable condition. His partner was released after treatment for a blunt-force injury, sources said.

The suspect, 34-year-old Jamal Funes of New Jersey, was shot “numerous” times and is in critical condition at Brookdale Hospital, NYPD Police Commissioner William Bratton said.

The cops spotted Funes with a gun inside his car. When they tried to pull him over he took off, sources said.

As he sped through Bedford-Stuyvesant, Funes shot at the cops from his vehicle, sources said. The officers, part of a plainclothes anti-crime unit working out of the 81st Precinct, called for backup.

Funes drove the wrong way on Lexington Avenue and slammed in to the officers’ marked patrol car.

By then, backup had arrived. Funes faced off against eight cops at the intersection of Lexington and Malcolm X Boulevard.

During the gun battle with the suspect, Reddin was struck in the hip, just below his bulletproof vest. Yurkiw was saved from death when a bullet hit his vest.

Funes stayed inside his car throughout the bloody shootout, said Bratton.

When it was over, cops recovered a .357-caliber handgun from the front seat of Funes’ car, along with five spent shell casings, the commissioner added.

The cops are “alert and talkative, and it was so good to see them in such good shape despite everything they’d been through,” said Mayor de Blasio. He called them “very dedicated officers.”

Redding, a nine-year veteran, is a married father of two with another child on the way, while Yurkiw has three years on the force, said de Blasio. The mayor did not identify the officers by name.

“This morning’s a reminder of the important and dangerous and crucial work that police officers do, and the way they put their lives on the line every single day,” de Blasio said.

Authorities are still piecing together Funes’ background and what might have prompted him to shoot at the cops, Bratton said.

“His history is what might have prompted him” to do this, the commissioner said.

Funes, who also goes by the name Fredrick, has at least 15 prior arrests on his record. His rap sheet includes a 2007 arrest for assaulting an NYPD cop and trying to take the officer’s gun, sources said. He served three years in prison on those charges.

In 2006, Funes was charged with assault in the second-degree for striking a child with a belt and was on probation for a year. And in 2002, he was charged with assault for punching a girl in the face.

Funes’s record also record includes 11 arrests in Illinois between 1996 and 2000. The details of those arrests was not known. At the time, Funes lived in a Chicago.

All of the shots fired during the Brooklyn shootout were captured on the NYPD’s ShotSpotter, a high-tech gunshot detection system, Bratton added.

It’s the second time this month that NYPD officers were shot in the line of duty.

On Feb. 4 Officers Diara Cruz and Patrick Espeut were shot at point-blank range in the stairwell of a Bronx housing project while on a vertical patrol.

Suspect Malik Chavis shot at the cops after they asked him for identification. He killed himself a few minutes later.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Those public housing vertical patrols are downright dangerous! That’s why I do not think NYPD officer Peter Liang should not have been criminally charged in the 2014 accidental stairwell shooting of a man (WHY JURY BELIEVED NYPD COP WAS LYING ABOUT STAIRWELL SHOOTING | 2-14-16).

Given the concentration of hoodlums, gangbangers, dope dealers and other scumbags that live in big city high-rise public housing projects, the last thing I would want to do is to go on vertical patrols there.