Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.

To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.

Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.

Steve meant so much to us.

We will miss him terribly.

Dirty Cop?

A plainclothes police officer was shot while patrolling a brownstone-lined street in Brooklyn early yesterday, the police said, and the husband of another officer was charged with attempted murder.

Officer Jacqueline Melendez Rivera, the wife of the accused man, was charged with hindering prosecution and was suspended from duty. About 4 a.m. at Prospect Place and Sixth Avenue in Park Slope, the Police Department said, a man pulled up in a sport utility vehicle alongside a car carrying four plainclothes officers. He opened fire, hitting the driver, Officer Andrew Suarez. The officer’s partners shot back.

When the police went looking for the gunman’s car, a white Acura with bullet holes, they found it a little more than a mile away. Behind the wheel was Officer Rivera, a law enforcement official said, and she told the police that she was moving the car because her husband had parked it illegally. Officer Rivera and her husband live less than two blocks from the site of the shooting.

Officer Rivera, 37, and her husband, Jose Rivera, 31, were brought in for questioning, although detectives did not think she had been in the car during the shooting, a law enforcement official said.

Mr. Rivera was accused of attempted murder, defacing a firearm, criminal possession of marijuana and other charges, the police said. Besides being charged with hindering prosecution, Officer Rivera was accused of tampering with evidence, possession of marijuana and obstructing governmental administration, the police said.

Officer Suarez was in critical but stable condition, city officials said, and the shooting left a trail of shattered glass and bullets at Prospect and Sixth.

Officer Suarez and three other members of the department’s anti-crime unit were patrolling in an unmarked car when they locked eyes with people inside the Acura, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

“Initially there was a glance exchanged, but no words were exchanged,” he said.

Mr. Kelly, who with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg visited the injured officer at New York Methodist Hospital, gave this account of what happened next:

The Acura began tailing the unmarked car, and Officer Suarez, a policeman for three and a half years, pulled over. The Acura then drew alongside them, and its tinted passenger window slid down.

The Acura’s driver leaned across the passenger, and yelled, “You got a beef?”

Then the driver pulled out a gun and fired twice, just as Officer Suarez raised his arm in defense. A bullet pierced his underarm, just clearing his bulletproof vest, and tore across his back before lodging beneath his neck.

Labels: New York city, police