New York City’s top cop vowed Friday that the NYPD will review its training protocol to ensure that tragedies such as the friendly-fire fatal shooting of Detective Brian Simonsen don’t happen again.
“We have to take a good, clear look at what we’re teaching our people in the academy, what we’re teaching them in service training about responding to jobs like this,” Commissioner James O’Neill told AM-970 radio host Joe Piscopo shortly after 8 a.m.
He’s referring to the moment Simonsen was accidentally shot and killed by fellow officers as they tried to stop career criminal Christopher Ransom, 27, who wielded a fake gun during a robbery at a Queens T-Mobile store on Tuesday night.
Ransom was arraigned on two counts of second-degree murder and other raps Friday afternoon via video hookup from his hospital bed that was streamed at Queens Criminal Court. Ransom was also wounded during the shootout and is still recovering at a hospital.
His Legal Aid attorney Ken Finkelman pushed for bail because Ransom had never been arrested on a violent crime and “it doesn’t make sense” to charge him with murder. He said prosecutors are “overcharging” Ransom considering he never actually fired a gun.
Finkelman and another Legal Aid attorney asked for protective custody and for suicide watch and said Ransom was attempting “suicide by cop” and “the only thing that was foreseeable [is] that he would be killed” after he pointed a fake gun at officers through the door of the phone store.
Sgt. Matthew Gorman was also wounded by a cop-fired bullet in the leg.
Assistant District Attorney Robert Ciesla said “remand is appropriate” because of the “truly horrific outcome . . . of the acts attributed to the defendant” and Ransom’s bench-warrant history.
A judge sided with the prosecution, and Ransom will remain in police custody at least until his next court date on Tuesday.
O’Neill said he plans to work with Terry Shortell, the chief of the NYPD’s training bureau, to examine what happened during the shootout. “She’ll come out with some recommendations to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” O’Neill said.
“You can have the best training in the world, but when you respond to a job of an armed commercial robbery, you’re thinking about a lot of different things, you’re talking to your partner. A lot of people responded to that.”
The top cop spoke about how the night unfolded — how Simonsen was not even supposed to be working, but decided to join Gorman in investigating a robbery just blocks from the T-Mobile store.
“They go inside the store and [Ransom] comes out of the back wearing a mask with a gun and gunfire erupts. He tries to get out of the store, pokes the gun out of the front door,” he says with a pause.
“And then Brian’s hit.”
Simonsen, who was in plain clothes, was standing in front of the store at the time and was not wearing a bulletproof vest.
Investigators quickly determined that Ransom’s black gun was fake, and that Simonsen had been mortally wounded by one of his own.
Additional reporting by Gabrielle Fonrouge
