Grief and outrage erupted from the widows and orphans of other slain cops yesterday at the heart-wrenching news that yet another city police officer had been gunned down in the line of duty.
“How did this animal get a gun?” said a tearful Rose Nemorin, whose husband, undercover detective James Nemorin, was shot and killed two years ago in Staten Island.
“Something has to be done. There are too many guns on the street,” Nemorin said.
“There needs to be a death penalty, so maybe, maybe, people think before they pull the trigger,” said Margaret Mosomillo, whose husband, Anthony, was shot dead in Brooklyn in 1998 while trying to execute a bench warrant to arrest a paroled drug dealer.
The slaying of Officer Daniel Enchautegui as he tried to stop the burglary of a neighbor’s house happened just hours before the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association’s annual Widows and Children’s Christmas party.
The party is supposed to ease families’ pain of living without their murdered loved ones.
“We come here to have a good time – and something like this reminds us why we’re here,” Nemorin said, “not that we need reminding.”
As children played and spouses mingled at Bridgewater’s at the South Street Seaport, widows and children intimately familiar with loss dwelled knowingly on the grief that Enchautegui’s family is suffering.
“When you hear stories like that, it breaks your heart,” Nemorin said.
Nemorin’s late husband and his partner, Rodney Andrews, were killed during an undercover sting that targeted illegal Staten Island gun dealers – just part of the police effort to rid the streets of deadly weapons like the one used yesterday to take Enchautegui’s life.
Just days earlier, Nemorin’s son, Stephan, 10, watched the funeral of murdered Officer Dillon Stewart, a father of two, on TV.
“Mom, they’ll have no fathers – like us,” Stephan said.
More than 100 families and children attended yesterday’s party.
“There seems to be a proliferation of guns, and the bad guys always seem to get them,” said Susan McCormack, whose husband, Joseph, was killed by a shotgun-toting maniac in The Bronx in 1983.
PBA President Pat Lynch recalled Enchautegui’s grief-stricken father’s telling him at the hospital: “He loved me too much.”
“No one understands that better than the people in this room,” Lynch said.