Police deaths timeline
6:05 a.m. - Brinsley calls his ex-girlfriend's mother and tells her he shot her daughter by accident and hopes she will survive.
6:35 a.m. - Brinsley boards a bus to New York City.
10:50 a.m. - The bus arrives in Manhattan.
12:07 p.m. - Brinsley discards his ex-girlfriend's phone in Brooklyn.
1:30 p.m. - Police in Baltimore County discover Brinsley has made posts from his Instagram account that threaten to kill officers. They determine the posts are being made from Brooklyn.
2:10 p.m. - Police in Baltimore County call the NYPD, advising officers that the phone of a suspect in the Owings Mills shooting is pinging in Brooklyn. The two police departments discuss the Instagram posts during the call, and the NYPD officer asks that a wanted poster of Brinsley be faxed to the NYPD.
2:45 p.m. - Brinsley walks up to two people on the street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, asks them to follow him on Instagram and tells them, "Watch what I'm going to do."
2:46 p.m. - Baltimore County Police Department faxes a wanted poster of Brinsley to the NYPD with information about him.
2:47 p.m. - Brinsley approaches the passenger window of a marked police car and opens fire, killing Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. With officers in pursuit, he runs to a nearby subway station, where he shoots himself in the head.
2:49 p.m. - The Baltimore County Police Department sends a teletype with the same information contained on the wanted poster to the NYPD's real-crime center at police headquarters.
— Associated Pres
Ex-officer not charged in shooting death
A former Milwaukee police officer who shot and killed a black man in April will not face charges, the city's district attorney announced Monday, calling the slaying "justified self-defense." But the Justice Department will launch a civil rights review of the case, a U.S. attorney announced later in the day. The ex-officer, Christopher Manney, who is white, encountered Dontre Hamilton while Hamilton was sleeping in a downtown park on April 30. Manney was patting down Hamilton when a struggle began. About a dozen witnesses said punches were thrown and Hamilton eventually got a hold of Manney's baton, according to the district attorney's report on the case. Manney then fired 14 times, killing the 31-year-old Hamilton with shots to the chest. Though the police department fired Manny in October, saying the pat-down was inappropriate, Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm said Monday that "there can be little serious doubt that P.O. Manney was justified in firing at Dontre Hamilton, who was attacking him with a deadly weapon." Hamilton's family reacted with disappointment and anger., but urged through their attorneys that protests be peaceful "so as not to dishonor Dontre's name and the Hamilton family name."
— Associated Press
“I think it’s important that, regardless of people’s viewpoints, that everyone step back,” de Blasio said in a speech Monday at the Police Athletic League. “I think it’s a time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in all due time.”
De Blasio’s relations with the city’s police unions have tumbled to an extraordinary new low — one not experienced by a mayor in the nation’s largest city in more than a generation — in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting in which the gunman claimed was retaliation for the deaths of black men at the hands of white police. In a display of defiance, dozens of police officers turned their backs to de Blasio when he visited the hospital where the officers died, and union leaders said the mayor had “blood on his hands,” accusing him of enabling the protesters who have swept the streets of New York since Dec. 3, when a grand jury declined to indict an officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner.
De Blasio, in his first extensive remarks since the killings, called for “everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in all due time.”
“We are working toward a day where we can achieve greater harmony toward policing and community,” he said.
Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were ambushed Saturday afternoon by a 28-year-old who vowed in an Instagram post that he would put “wings on pigs.” The suspect, Ishmaaiyl Brinsley was black; the slain New York Police Department officers were Hispanic and Asian.
The killings came as police nationwide are being criticized following Garner’s death and the fatal shooting of another unarmed African-American, 18-year-old Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo. Protests erupted after grand juries declined to charge officers in either case.
De Blasio said it was time to focus on the officers’ grieving families. He and Police Commissioner William Bratton met with them earlier Monday.
“There’s a lot of pain. It’s so hard to make sense of it — how one deeply troubled, violent individual could do this to these good families,” a somber de Blasio said. “And I think it’s a time for everyone to take stock that there are things that unite us, there are things that we hold dear as New Yorkers, as Americans.”
Investigators said Brinsley was a bystander during a protest two days before the Garner grand jury decision. It remained unclear if it was his primary motivation or one he simply latched onto for the final act in a violent rampage that began Saturday morning in Baltimore when he shot his ex-girlfriend in the stomach.
Police are trying to determine Brinsley’s whereabouts in the two hours he was in New York before killing the officers. Video gathered by police shows Brinsley holding a foam food container that investigators believe held the gun he used. After the shooting, he then ran into a nearby subway station and killed himself.
The police unions blame de Blasio for fostering an anti-police sentiment. Sergeants Benevolent Associations head Edward Mullins refused to back down from that stance, saying in an interview Monday that “the mayor has turned his back on us — he got elected on his campaign of attacking the police all along.”
Later Monday, Police Commissioner William Bratton said he had met with representatives from the five unions who agreed to stand down.
“And then we can continue the dialogue that had begun about issues and differences that exist,” Bratton said.
Meanwhile, big-city police departments and union leaders around the country were warning the rank and file to wear bulletproof vests and avoid making inflammatory posts on social media.
A union-generated message at the 35,000-officer NYPD warned officers that they should respond to every radio call with two cars — “no matter what the opinion of the patrol supervisor” — and not make arrests “unless absolutely necessary.”
About the Author
