NYPD officer killed, another injured in shooting in Harlem

By Michael R. Sisak | Related press

NEW YORK – A New York Police Department officer 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 two officers went into the back room where the son was, and gunshots were heard, 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 was at the hospital where officers were taken after the shooting, the third time in four days officers have faced gunfire 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 fight 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 2015, a man on a stolen bicycle shot and killed Officer Randolph Holder when Holder and his teammates approached him on a pedestrian bridge on a Manhattan highway.

Last year, officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were shot dead by an ambush while they were sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn. The man who made threatening posts online with a vow to put “wings on pigs” – ran into a subway station and committed suicide.

Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz of New York and Deepti Hajela of Essex County, New Jersey, contributed to this report.