Four NYPD cops shot in Brooklyn - Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg speak out - VIDEO

All four cops sustain injuries, none fatal

By

KERRY O'SHEA,

IrishCentral Staff Writer

Larger Text

Print

E-mail

5 Comments

Ray Kelly holds a jar containing the bullet removed from Police Officer Kevin Brennan's head and points to where the officer was shot - behind the left ear.

Photo by NY Daily News

Tweet

A shootout in Brooklyn over the weekend that injured four on-duty police officers prompted a press conference from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. The two are equally distraught about the rising violence towards police officers.

During a press conference held the morning following the shootout, Commissioner Ray Kelly gave the details as to what exactly happened in the apartment in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn. Kelly said how Nakwon Foxworth , a 33-year-old tenant, got into some kind of dispute with a moving company.

Foxworth, who has already served ten years in prison, was with his pregnant girlfriend Jessica Hickling and their four month old child at the time of the incident. Foxworth had gotten into an altercation with some movers in the apartment complex.

“We had a barrel in front of the door and all of a sudden he gets angry,” one of the movers, Kairon Decaul, told the New York Daily News.

“He took the stroller, with the baby in it, and started ramming it into the barrel. He became very angry. The woman started screaming, ‘The baby! The baby!’”

“My friend ran, and he chased him to the truck,” Decaul said. “He came back inside and threw the gun in the baby's stroller. He put his finger in my face and threatened me. The girl was screaming, ‘calm down! calm down!’”

Foxworth then returned to his apartment and barricaded himself there along with his girlfriend and child. Hickling managed to escape from the apartment with her child once the police arrived.

However, with the arrival of the police came the wild shootout that injured four police officers.

“He struck detective Michael Keenan in his left calf, detective Kenneth Ayala in the thigh and foot, police officer Matthew Granahan in his left calf and captain Al Pizzano sustained a graze wound to his face,” Commissioner Kelly said at a news conference following the shootings.

“Although hit, Detective Ayala and Officer Granahan returned fire, striking Foxworth in the abdomen,” Kelly added. He also noted how the fight took place in “close quarters”  within the apartment.

Ray Kelly said that police confiscated three guns and 50 rounds of ammunition from Nakwon Foxworth’s apartment. The 9 mm Browning handgun used on the cops was part of a multiple gun purchase made in North Carolina, officials said.

Cops also found a loaded, defaced .22 caliber revolver and a sawed-off military assault rifle equipped with a scope. Those weapons had been stolen from Florida, Commissioner Kelly said.

“All of these shootings have a disgraceful fact in common. All were committed with illegal guns that came from out of state,” said Mayor Bloomberg in the wake of the shooting.

Six NYPD cops have been shot this year so far. Det. Kevin Herlihy survived being shot in the arm during a shootout in a Harlem subway station on Valentine’s Day, and Officer Kevin Brennan is recovering from being shot in the head in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on January 31.

“Until Congress wakes up and finds some courage to stand up to the gun lobby, illegal guns will continue to end up in the hands of dangerous people, like tonight’s shooter who had a small arsenal of illegal guns,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at the news conference. “And if that means we have to start calling Senators and members of Congress in the middle of the night when we get these shooting calls, maybe we should just start doing that.”

Here, Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly discuss the Brooklyn shootout in a press conference:

Print

E-mail

Tweet