The friendly fire death of an NYPD detective in Queens came amid a flurry of 42 cop bullets fired at a masked career criminal who charged at officers with a fake gun, police sources said Wednesday.
When the smoke cleared, suspect Christopher Ransom survived eight gunshots — while veteran Detective Brian Simonsen was killed by a single slug to the chest.
Another cop, Sgt. Matthew Gorman, was hit in the leg by another officer’s gunfire.
“Mr. Ransom’s bizarre behavior is a case of tragic irony,” said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, for which Simonsen, 42, was his squad’s delegate. “[Ransom] confronted cops with an imitation gun during the commission of a robbery, which indicates to me he wanted to commit ‘suicide by cop.’
“The irony is that he lived and the cop died.”
One department insider agreed that Ransom “definitely” had a death wish, given his desperate situation: “There was no way he was shooting his way out of there.”
Ransom, who remained hospitalized Wednesday, was hit with a slew of charges, including murder, assault, robbery and aggravated manslaughter.
The deadly barrage, which officials said unfolded in all of a minute, was the chaotic culmination of Ransom’s interrupted robbery of a T-Mobile store Tuesday night, according to cops.
Ransom, 27, stormed into the Richmond Hill store at about 6 p.m. wearing a black mask, ordered two workers into a back room and tied them up, police sources said.
He filled a duffel bag with cash and phone SIM cards.
Outside, at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and 120th Street, cops alerted by two 911 callers were massing, among them 19-year NYPD veteran Simonsen, who was working on his day off to crack a robbery pattern ahead of a Thursday CompStat meeting, sources said.
Gorman, 31, and two fellow officers were the first to push into the mobile store, which they found abandoned — until Ransom sprang from the back room, pointing the fake gun at them and pulling the trigger, authorities said.
Assuming Ransom’s firearm to be real and simply jammed, the trio took no chances and retreated to the street, where they took up tactical positions along with Simonsen and four other cops, according to police.
Still holding his gun high and dry-firing it, Ransom emerged from the store to find himself in the middle of two waves of blue, with a group of cops including Gorman to his right, and Simonsen among a squad to his left, sources said.
“He’s coming out of the store and they’re down the block to the right and left,” said NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan at a Wednesday briefing. “You’re investigating a possible crime and all of a sudden somebody’s pointing what is believed to be a firearm at you.”
Seven officers opened fire, squeezing off a total of 42 rounds.
Gorman fired 11 times. Simonsen shot twice.
“Be advised, I’m shot,” a cop, presumably Gorman, can be heard telling a dispatcher in a police radio recording of the drama, posted to Twitter by @NYScanner. “Please set up a route going to Jamaica [Hospital].”
Though the recording is apparently partially redacted, Simonsen’s voice is never heard above the din of gunfire and frantic calls of “Shots fired!”
The mayhem was over in seconds.
“It was only about a minute in all, from when everyone arrived to when shots are fired,” said Chief Kevin Maloney, head of the NYPD’s Force Investigation Division, which is probing the wild incident.
Once Ransom was down, the toll of the fusillade, all NYPD rounds, became apparent to cops.
Gorman had caught a round in the leg, while Simonsen, who hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest, was shot through the chest.
Gorman was treated at Jamaica Hospital, where he remained Wednesday.
In the same hospital, Simonsen was pronounced dead, leaving behind a wife and a mother.
“At this hour, I will tell you that this appears to be an absolutely tragic case of friendly fire,” a teary Police Commissioner James O’Neill said at the hospital. “Make no mistake about it, friendly fire aside, it is because of the actions of the suspect that Detective Simonsen is dead.”
Ransom, recuperating from his own wounds in the ICU at NewYork-Presbyterian/Queens Hospital, was formally arrested late Wednesday.
Defendants can be charged with felony murder whenever a homicide occurs in the commission of a serious crime, even if they weren’t directly culpable, explained Michael C. Farkas, a former city homicide prosecutor now in private practice.
“If the suspect was in the course of the commission of a robbery, and during that robbery someone is killed, it seems like this situation would call for a charge of felony murder,” said Farkas.
Added Dan Ollen, another city prosecutor-turned-defender, “Given the fact that causation is defined as conduct which forges a critical link in the chain of events that led to the detective’s death, it sounds like Mr. Ransom is in serious trouble.”
Meanwhile, cops are working to sort out whether proper protocol was followed, and who shot whom in the pandemonium, a process involving painstaking reviews of both street surveillance videos and footage from the bodycams of up to six officers.
As that probe is ongoing, the officers involved are waiting with bated breath — in fear that they fired the shot that killed their brother in blue.
“I don’t think anyone knows yet,” said one high-ranking police official. “I’m sure every one of them thinks they did it.”
Said another source of Gorman, who watched his squad mate die feet from him on Atlantic Avenue: “He has that thousand-yard stare. He kind of had a silence about him.”
Monahan made no bones about the fact that even though the bullets that killed Simonsen and maimed Gorman were NYPD-issued, the responsibility lay at the feet of the career criminal who started the fatal sequence of events.
“The scene is caused by a man charging at these officers,” the chief of department said at the Wednesday briefing. “He was pointing a gun at them.
“The blame goes to that individual.”
Additional reporting by Emily Saul, Rebecca Rosenberg and Ruth Weissmann