Police Shooting Wounds Armed Suspect in Harlem

Two police officers shot and wounded an armed man early Sunday morning near a public housing development in East Harlem, the police said.

The man, a 23-year-old whose name was not immediately released, was arrested and taken in critical but stable condition to New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center with several gunshot wounds to his body. A .22 caliber revolver was recovered at the scene, the police said.

The names of the two officers, a 33-year-old man with eight years on the force and a 24-year-old man with two years on the force, were not released by the police and a spokeswoman declined to provide them.

Neither had been involved in prior shootings, the police said.

The episode began around 2 a.m. when the uniformed officers, assigned to the Housing Bureau and on routine patrol in a marked police car, responded to a call of a large and rowdy group at 215 East 102 Street in the middle of the Washington Houses. The 911 caller said one of the men in the group may have a gun, the police said.

After the officers arrived, they began talking to members of the group and during the course of questioning one man, he ran off, the police said.

At some point, as the officers pursued the man, they determined that he had a gun. The police said he turned and pointed the weapon at the two officers and that and both officers opened fire. It was not immediately clear how many times each fired; the man was struck more than once.

The shooting was the second in three days by police in that area of of Manhattan. Several blocks away from the location of Sunday morning’s shooting, officers on Friday afternoon killed a man suspected in in a pharmacy robbery after tracking him to East 96th Street using a GPS device embedded in a decoy bottle of pills. The man pointed his weapon at the officers before they opened fire, the police said.
Source: New York Times