A Brooklyn shooting incident that police initially attributed to an armed suspect has turned out to be a case of friendly fire, with the New York Police Department confirming on Monday that Detective Robert L. Karroll was accidentally shot by a fellow officer early Sunday morning \u2014 not by the 18-year-old man at the centre of the encounter.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Detective Karroll was struck once in the back, the bullet absorbed by his bulletproof vest. In the hours immediately following the shooting, the NYPD had publicly stated that the detective was shot by a man who brandished a firearm at officers near the corner of Nostrand Avenue and St. Johns Place in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn, shortly before 4:15 a.m. That account did not hold.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The reversal is significant.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Police Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch, speaking at a news conference at Kings County Hospital \u2014 where Detective Karroll was recovering \u2014 had already begun walking back the initial narrative on Sunday, declining to specify who had actually fired the shot that struck her officer. She acknowledged that investigators lacked body-worn camera footage of the shooting itself, explaining that it had unfolded “so quickly and unexpectedly” that the cameras had not captured the critical moment. By Monday, the department confirmed in a written statement what the footage gap had left uncertain: the wound came from within the officers’ own ranks.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The sequence of events that brought Detective Karroll to that corner began well before the shooting. He and his fellow officers had been on patrol in Manhattan on the Fourth of July when, just before midnight, they were reassigned to Brooklyn. Several hours later, around 4:05 a.m., an 18-year-old man \u2014 whose name the police have not released \u2014 drew a firearm outside a deli on Nostrand Avenue near Sterling Place and pointed it at another person in the street before entering the deli. He remained inside briefly, then left and fired at a passing vehicle, striking it; the Uber driver and his passenger escaped unharmed.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The man then walked one block south on Nostrand Avenue and approached the driver’s side of Detective Karroll’s police vehicle with his gun drawn. Officers opened fire. The suspect fled on foot and was arrested approximately ten minutes later, near the corner of Union Street and Rogers Avenue. It was in that exchange \u2014 chaotic, fast-moving, unfolding in the early hours of a holiday weekend \u2014 that Detective Karroll was struck by a round fired by one of his own colleagues.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The NYPD has not yet said whether a formal investigation into the friendly-fire incident is underway, nor has it identified the officer whose shot struck Detective Karroll. The case raises familiar questions about coordination and situational awareness in high-pressure, low-light encounters \u2014 questions the department will likely face in the days ahead.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Brooklyn shooting incident that police initially attributed to an armed suspect has turned out to be a case of friendly fire, with the New York Police Department confirming on Monday that Detective Robert L. Karroll was accidentally shot by a fellow officer early Sunday morning \u2014 not by the 18-year-old man at the centre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\n