Mayor Mamdani on Thursday said he was “incredibly troubled” by the actions of an off-duty cop assigned to Gracie Mansion who shot and critically wounded a suspected car thief in the Bronx — a 12-year NYPD veteran who has not been charged three days after the incident.
“I’m glad that the NYPD is investigating it,” Mamdani said at an unrelated press conference. “The officer has been suspended in the interim.”
Little has been released on the investigation into the police-involved shooting, with the exception that Police Officer Jonathan Baez was suspended without pay on Wednesday as the probe into the matter continued.
The person the cop shot, a 30-year-old Hispanic man, remained clinging to life at an upper Manhattan hospital.
“I’m incredibly troubled by the incident,” Mamdani said.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has not spoken publicly about the shooting, but an NYPD spokeswoman said Baez was suspended “at the direction of the police commissioner.”
“The investigation is ongoing,” the spokeswoman said, adding that the commissioner rarely speaks publicly about police-involved shootings, leaving that task to borough and precinct commanders.
On Thursday morning, civil-rights leaders Rev. Kevin McCall and Hawk Newsome, the leader of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, held a press conference outside Gracie Mansion. The two are working with the shooting victim’s family and are demanding more transparency and accountability from the police and City Hall concerning this case.
McCall said the mayor quickly came to the defense of 22-year-old Jabez Chakraborty, a mentally ill Queens man shot by responding officers in his family home back in January.
Mamdani called for no criminal charges to be filed against the mentally ill man, who was ultimately hit with attempted assault and weapons possession.
“(He) was very quick to run to judgment (on the Chakraborty case) and urged Tisch not to charge the shooting victim,” McCall said. “But in the Black and Brown community when a Hispanic gets shot, a Black gets shot, you hear radio silence from the mayor. It’s like selective leadership,” he said. “(About) 1.1 million people voted for him. It wasn’t just a Muslim in the Bangladeshi community that voted for him.”
When asked about McCall’s statements, Mamdani said “this will be a city that cares for each and every person that calls it home.
“We know that, for far too long, we have not recognized the fact that Black history and New York City history are one in the same,” Mamdani said.
Rev. McCall applauded Tisch for quickly suspending Baez.
“This is a great step in the right direction,” he said. “She’s no-nonsense.”
Before Monday’s shooting, Baez, a uniformed officer, worked posts at both Gracie Mansion and City Hall as part of the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau.
The cop was off duty and tracking his stolen car Monday night when he spotted a vehicle he believed was used by a lookout working with the car thief and followed it, law enforcement sources said.
When that car eventually pulled over and the driver got out on W. 231st St. near Albany Crescent in Kingsbridge around 9:15 p.m. Baez confronted him with his weapon drawn.
One or two passengers remained in the suspected lookout car, and when someone inside the vehicle rolled down the window, Baez fired off two shots, hitting the front-seat passenger in the head, sources said.
Surveillance video obtained by the Daily News shows a man exiting an SUV and approaching a white sedan with his pistol drawn. A man who can be seen standing behind the sedan appears to kneel as the gunman approaches, the video shows.
As the footage continues, the pair fall out of sight behind the white sedan for about a minute before the sedan suddenly speeds away, revealing one man splayed across the ground as the gunman appears to straddle him.
Roni Jacobson / New York Daily News
At Bronx Public, a restaurant across street, a bullet from the shooting shattered a window and lodged near the ceiling. (Roni Jacobson / New York Daily News)
A bullet from the shooting shattered a window at Bronx Public, a restaurant located across street. The slug ended up embedding itself in a wall near the ceiling.
“It was scary,” said bartender Ariana Melo. “The impact was loud. I jumped.”
The driver of the white sedan took the wounded passenger to New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in upper Manhattan, where he remained in critical condition Thursday.
No charges have been filed against the wounded man nor the man seen on the ground in the video.
Sources with knowledge of the case said police and prosecutors are in the middle of a dismal waiting game to see if the man Baez shot dies of his injuries.
If he does, the case may be handed over to the New York State Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigation, which reviews cases where a police officer causes a person’s death, whether on duty or off duty.
On March 2, the Attorney General’s Office announced the filing of manslaughter and vehicular homicide charges against NYPD Sgt. Tiffany Howell, who was accused of killing a 61-year-old Upper East Side doorman in a head-on collision on the Taconic State Parkway.
It took more than five weeks for the attorney general to file charges after the Jan. 22 fatal crash.
The girlfriend of the man Baez shot lives in a building just steps away from the scene and was on the phone with her boyfriend when he was shot, a neighbor told the Daily News Tuesday night.
“I heard multiple gunshots. The first two triggered me to come (into the hallway),” said 30-year-old Selina Roode. “(The wounded man’s girlfriend) was on speaker phone with her boyfriend as it was happening in real time.
“He was shot as he approached the building,” Roode added. “Nothing like that has ever happened around here. The neighborhood has changed.”
