NEW YORK—“Why does it have to take a tragedy for the community to come together?” one woman cried out as she struggled to stifle her tears.
Others, too, couldn’t help but shed tears as they placed flowers and candles on the sidewalk near the location where two police officers were killed Saturday afternoon in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.
At around 3 p.m. Saturday, officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were sitting in a police car outside Tompkins Ave., assigned to the area as part of NYPD’s response to a recent spike in violence at the nearby Tompkins Houses.
Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, from Baltimore, Md., then walked up to the car and fired his gun four times through the front passenger window, striking each officer in the head.
Brinsley fled to a nearby subway station, where he shot himself in the head, according to the police. He later died.
The killings occur at a time of strained relations between some New Yorkers and the police department, which began after a white police officer on Staten Island, Daniel Pantaleo, placed a chokehold on an unarmed black man, Eric Garner, leading to his death.
For weeks, thousands of people have demonstrated across the city, against a grand jury’s decision to not indict Pantaleo.
Brinsley, who had a troubled history of attempted suicides and estrangement from his family, posted on his social media accounts that he planned to kill police officers in retaliation for Garner’s death. He wrote: “I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours, let’s take 2 of theirs,” then referenced Garner and Michael Brown, a black teen in Ferguson, Mo., who was also killed by a white police officer.
Both men’s deaths have sparked a national conversation about whether policing tactics in America are too aggressive and discriminate against people of color.
New Yorkers Mourn
