"Officer Dillon Stewart chased the fleeing car through the dark streets of Brooklyn, blowing through red lights and hitting speeds of up to 60 mph, finally edging next to it when the car pulled up at an intersection.
In what would be his final act, he offered the driver a chance, his partner told jurors yesterday.
"Officer Stewart told the occupant of the vehicle to make it easy on himself, to give himself up," Police Officer Paul Lipka said in his just-the-facts-ma'am testimony of the fateful scene at the intersection of Flatbush and Church Aves. on Nov.28, 2005.
The driver responded to Stewart's generosity with a shot from a black-handled 9-mm. Glock that pierced the 35-year-old officer's heart and ended his life.
"I observed a male hand with a firearm in it [and] I heard two loud bangs," Lipka said, as Stewart's wife, Leslyn, sat watching in the second row of the Brooklyn courtroom surrounded by family and police officers from her husband's 70thPrecinct.
Allan Cameron, 27, the man charged with firing those shots, has denied murdering Stewart, though he admitted being chased by cops that night and pulling over before speeding away again. His lawyers have suggested Stewart was killed by friendly police fire.
Lipka, 35, sat calmly in the witness box as prosecutor Mark Hale took him through a computer-generated reenactment of the chase projected onto a screen in front of the jury.
Stewart and Lipka, wearing bullet-resistant vests under their uniforms, were driving an unmarked car in Flatbush when they saw the red Infiniti zoom past a red light.
"I looked at Officer Stewart and said, 'You want to go stop him?' He said, 'Yes,' and I turned on the lights," Lipka said.
The car took them on a loop around Flatbush, finally stopping against traffic on Church Ave., Lipka said. The driver fired at them from just a few feet away and both cops covered their faces with their arms.
"Our driver's-side window broke ... shattered," Lipka said. "It landed on me and Officer Stewart."
The Infiniti took off and pulled into a garage on E. 21st St., less than two blocks away, as Stewart and Lipka pulled up behind it. Lipka jumped out and pumped two shots at the car before the metal garage door closed, he told jurors.
He turned around and saw Stewart standing behind him, near their unmarked car, he said.
"He grabbed his vest, pulled it forward and said, 'I've been shot,'" Lipka said, not even a crack in his voice as he told jurors the last words he heard his partner utter.
Stewart died six hours later."
Black. Means very, very dangerous. Most certainly, the black-handle made the 9 mm GLOCK more powerful than, say, a chartreuse one. Powerful enough to slice through body armor like butter. Since the vest the officer was wearing was designed to stop 9 mm bullets fired dead-center into it, there can be no other reason for its failure to stop black-handled ones other than that infamous, well, black handle. Which is why I am calling for an immediate moratorium on all black firearms. Yes, the tactics the police employed were deplorable, leading to the death of a brave officer, and yes, serious questions should be focused upon the body armor that failed to stop a glorified mousegun, and I for one would certainly like to know if the original article on this tragedy...one that is no longer available by the way...that described the officer's vest as "riddled", was just sloppy journalistic hyperbole or fact.
Sloppy journalism and sloppy policework aside, the one thing we can do immediately is to ban the black. The officer's fired at their assailant and missed, he fired and did not. Also, perhaps the NYPD should also look into training their personnel on the use of firearms, at least until they can achieve the proficiency of middle of the night stick-up men.
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