NEW YORK (RNN) - Two New York Police Department officers died Saturday after the shooter conducted an ambush-style attack and then turned a gun on himself, a law enforcement official said.
Both officers were sitting in their patrol car in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn when attacked. They were rushed to Woodhull Medical Center in critical condition, and both died later.
The NYPD official said both officers were shot in the upper body. The New York Times reported the last officer in the city shot and killed in the line of duty was in 2011.
The gunman escaped the scene and died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Nationwide, there have been protests over police brutality and outrage at the decisions not to levy charges against police officers in separate incidents involving the deaths of black men.
One of those cases involved Eric Garner, a Staten Island, NY, man who died in July after NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo used a chokehold the department had banned. Michael Brown, an 18-year-old man in Ferguson, MO, died in August from gunshot wounds in a confrontation with former officer Darren Wilson.
Grand juries in both cases decided not to charge the officers in the deaths.
In a third case, Cleveland 12-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by police officer Tim Loehmann when Rice was waving a toy gun around in a park. Surveillance video showed the officer fired the shots within two seconds of his patrol car pulling up.
At times, some protests across the country have become violent and targeted law enforcement officials, particularly in Ferguson, where officers were struck and patrol cars burned after the grand jury's decision was announced.
full article:
2 NYPD officers die after shooting ambush - CBS 5 - KPHO