One is dead, the other is dying after trying to quell a domestic quarrel. Security is the first challenge for the new mayor Adams: “Washington stops the flow of weapons”
FROM THE CORRESPONDENT FROM WASHINGTON. The life of 22-year-old Jason Rivera, from less than two New York City cops, came to a halt on Friday night when he and a colleague, Wilbert Mora, 27, for 4 in the Police Department, responded to the request. helping a woman in Harlem over a family quarrel.
When the two officers arrived on 135th Street near Lenox Avenue, they found Ms. McNeil in front of the house with one of her children, a disabled boy, by her side. The other had barricaded himself in the farthest room. The two agents entered, walked down the long and narrow corridor when suddenly the door swung open and Lashawn McNeil, 47, fired a barrage of shots that instantly killed Rivera and wounded Mora who is now fighting between life and death at Harlem Hospital with a bullet lodged in the brain. McNeil, who is on probation for a series of crimes including possession of drugs and weapons, tried to escape but was shot in the arm and head by shots fired by a third officer who was on the scene and is in very serious condition.
“It’s an attack not just on the police but on New York City,” thundered New York City Mayor Eric Adams at a press conference at Harlem Hospital. The mayor, a former police captain elected on the basis of a program that put security at the center of the political agenda, is already in trouble. He has just been in office for three weeks in which the Big Apple has experienced a resurgence of violence and repeated attacks on the police. At least 5 policemen have been injured in shootings in the last ten days, one – Rivera in fact – is dead. It was since April 2021 that an agent was not killed while on duty.
On Thursday, a policeman engaged in an anti-drug operation in Staten Island was shot in the leg and is hospitalized. Last week a woman was pushed onto the subway tracks as a convoy was arriving in the central Times Square; Wednesday a man shot an 11-year-old girl in the face in the Bronx. “If this is not a wake-up call, I don’t know what it is,” said the mayor who yesterday stressed that “no one will violently divide our city” before pointing the finger at Congress because – according to him – it does too little to stop the circulation of weapons in the cities. Compared to 2020 in New York, shootings grew by 2.6%. The murders reached 485, 4% more than in 2020: to find a higher figure we must go back to 2011 when the victims were 515.
Murderer McNeil fired a .45 Glock but also possessed other weapons. This one in particular he had stolen in 2017 in Baltimore, the city where he lived before his mother asked him, last November, to move to New York to help her follow her disabled brother. She had specifically asked him not to “bring guns home to New York.” And when agents Rivera and Mora rushed in, he told them he didn’t believe Lashawn had guns with him. Unfortunately, this was not the case.
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