Brooklyn resident Nakwon Foxworth, 33, got into an argument with a group of moving company employees, Kelly said, and threatened them with a gun.
Foxworth took his pregnant girlfriend — who was also carrying their 4-month-old son in her arms — back to their Nostrand Ave. apartment on the sixth floor.
One of the moving company employees called police, according to Kelly, and told a dispatcher, “He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun.”
NYPD investigators teamed up with the building superintendent to use surveillance footage to determine where Foxworth lived, Kelly said. Once they found his apartment, police looked through the peephole and saw that Foxworth was holding the girlfriend and infant at gunpoint.
A short while later, Kelly said, the woman busted through the apartment door and told police that she was being held hostage. She also said that Foxworth had a gun.
Cops entered and a gun battle broke out.
“The gunfight occurred in close quarters with the assailant and the officers no more than 10 feet apart,” Kelly said. “With Det. Ayala and Officer Granahan returning fire and sticking Foxworth in the abdomen. A third ESU officer also fired. It was a good thing that Foxworth stopped shooting.”
Foxworth fired 12 rounds at the officers, police said.
The officers include: Det. Michael Keenan, 52, who was shot in front calf; Det. Kenneth Ayala, 40, who was shot twice — once in the thigh and once in the left ankle; Officer Matthew Granahan, 35, who was shot in the calf; and Captn. Al Pizzano, 49, who was grazed in the face.
As always, the official account of an armed encounter in The City That Never Sleeps doesn’t seem quite like it seems. Why did NYPD Emergency Service Officers enter the apartment all guns blazing after the “hostages” came out? Who was at risk then, exactly? How many rounds did the cops fire? And why didn’t New York’s finest shoot a dog? Speaking of dangerous curs . . .
Records show that Foxworth was incarcerated for 10 years for robbery and selling drugs in prison, and two years for attempted murder.
So Foxworth was an ex-con—without legal gun rights—who held—illegally—a 9 mm Browning handgun, a .22 caliber revolver and a “military assault rifle” equipped with a scope. And a new law could have stopped Foxworth by . . .
Preventing him from buying illegal guns!
At the post-shooting press conference, New York City Police Commissioner Kelly was quick to direct press attention to the source of Foxworth’s firearms. The Commish said the Browning heater was “part of a multiple-gun purchase in Wilmington, North Carolina.” Legal or illegal? By Foxworth or someone else?
The rifle discovered at the scene was “stolen from Florida.” The barrel was “sawed-off.” So it was an illegal gun illegally modified by unknown criminals transported in an unknown fashion to a New York City criminal who possessed it illegally and used it illegally.
And if that wasn’t enough to stoke the fires of gun control advocacy, gothamist.com reports that “Foxworth had a total of 50 rounds for his mini-14 assault weapon – the same ammunition used by the U.S. military in M-4 and M-16 rifles.” Oh, and the .22 caliber revolver was “defaced.” So it, too, was illegally modified by unknown criminals and held and used illegally by a convicted criminal.
So how do we keep these illegal weapons from getting into the hands of dangerous criminals? I’m thinking we arrest the dangerous criminals who stole them. And the ones who modified them. And transported them. And sold them. And bought them. And used them.
Do we need new laws for that action? No we do not. And while it’s best to stop the bad guys from getting the guns in the first place (i.e. stealing them), sometimes you can only catch them after the guns have been used. Life’s like that. Bottom line? Society’s anti-gun crime forces need to focus on the bad guys, not the guns or the gun laws per se.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg knows this. But he also knows that the New York City justice system doesn’t do so well in the putting bad guys away for a long time department (for various reasons). In fact, Mayor Mike knows the court system works so badly that a Brooklyn judge let a man wanted for shooting someone in a parking lot in North Carolina skate. Lamont Pride then shot a New York City police officer named Peter Figoski. [Click here for TTAG’s coverage.]
Notice how prominently figures in Bloomberg’s post-game wrap-up in the quad-officer shooting conference.
We have now had eight – that’s correct, eight – members of the department shot in the last four months. And this is the second time in the last 24 hours police have been fired upon by armed assailants. All the shootings have a disgraceful fact in common: all were committed with illegal guns that came from out of state. And that is the case with nearly every shooting in our city. We got very lucky tonight, with no life-threatening injuries to officers or innocent bystanders. But sometimes, as you remember, we aren’t so lucky, as we saw with the murder of Police Officer Peter Figoski in December. We will continue to do everything that we can take illegal weapons off our streets, but until Congress wakes up and finds some courage to stand up to the gun lobby, illegal guns will continue to end up in the hands of dangerous people like tonight’s shooter, who had a small arsenal of illegal guns.
That’s it: let’s blame the gun lobby and out-of-state gun smugglers for all of the Big Apple’s officer-involved shootings. Or, more effectively, not. [h/t Allen]