TheeBadOne
Member
http://www.inq7.net/brk/2002/aug/07/brkoth_6-1.htm
Hero cop who tried to stop
bus robbery shot dead
Posted:7:37 PM (Manila Time) | Aug. 07, 2002
INQ7.net
A TRAFFIC police officer tried to single-handedly stop five armed robbers from victimizing passengers of a Manila-bound commercial bus but was shot and stabbed dead by the assailants, a television report said Wednesday.
Police Officer 3 Oliver Benedicto wounded three of the robbers but all the five assailants were able to escape, GMA Network's "Frontpage" newscast said.
The report said the robbers boarded the Viva Aladdin bus in San Fernando, Pampanga Tuesday, and declared a hold-up. They ordered the passengers to draw the curtains of the bus and to hand in all their cellular phones, money and other valuables.
Benedicto, who was among the 11 passengers on board the bus, tried to stop the robbery and engaged the armed men in a shootout.
The policeman was on his way home to his family in Manila to celebrate his and his wife's 15th wedding anniversary on Tuesday, his wife Susan said.
Benedicto had been originally assigned to the Northern Police District in Metro Manila but was re-assigned to Pampanga.
Police officials have promised to extend financial assistance to Benedicto's family.
©2002 www.inq7.net all rights reserved
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/4545251.htm
Mayor hosts hero cop at Birds game
Wounded officer sees romp up close
By JIM NOLAN
[email protected]
IT WASN'T EXACTLY the way Nick Smith dreamed he'd make his Veterans Stadium debut - being pushed in a wheelchair, accompanied by the mayor.
But the soft-spoken cop - who knows something about bad breaks and do-or-die situations - was happy just to be in the game.
"Being on the field was great," he said, smiling broadly, recalling well wishes from fullback Cecil Martin and Donovan McNabb before yesterday's bittersweet Eagles 38-14 plucking of the Arizona Cardinals.
"The closest I've ever been."
When he was a teen-ager, Smith, now 22, was the star running back for his township youth football team in Bensalem, Bucks County, leading it to an undefeated season one year.
As a football player, they say Smith was a little bit like Birds' running back Duce Staley: Always working. Always looking for the right time and place to make his move.
Never giving up.
Like thousands of other boys, Smith's dream of wearing Eagles green faded to fandom. So at age 19, Smith put on the blue uniform of a Philadelphia police officer. And the same skills that made him a success on the football field marked his work as a cop.
He worked in the 35th District with his partner, Ed Fidler, the Cecil Martin to his Duce, gaining ground on the drug trade in Olney corner by corner, arrest by arrest
"We gang tackled a lot of bad guys," said Fidler, 33, who escorted Smith to the game.
"We could just look at each other and know what the other guy was thinking. This guy might have a gun, this guy might have drugs. We knew how to act just by looking at each other."
On Sept. 24, Smith pursued a drug suspect down a narrow alley off Wellens Avenue. During the pursuit, the suspect, Brian Carr, turned and fired, striking Smith in the abdomen, just below his protective vest. More shots rang out and Carr was fatally wounded.
Fidler, who was circling around the other side of the alley to corner the man at Fisher Avenue, heard the shots and seconds later found Smith barely conscious in a pool of blood.
Fidler decided not to wait for an ambulance. Though he'd never played organized football before, he called an audible. He lifted his critically wounded partner, put him in the back of a squad car and rushed him along with other officers to Albert Einstein Medical Center.
Doctors later said that if Smith had been a minute later to the operating table, he would have bled to death.
Six weeks of hospital care followed, buoyed by watching the Eagles games on Sundays with Fidler and the cops from the 35th District's Squad One.
Eagles losses were a little easier to take knowing that Smith would survive to make a full recovery.
"Normally [the games] were the biggest deal," said Fidler. "But some things are bigger than football. I think 'perspective' is the word."
Commitment is another word with meaning to Nick Smith - and Mayor Street, who yesterday made good on his bedside promise to host the hero cop and his partner in his box at the Vet.
"It's awfully important for people in this line of work, who risk their lives everyday, to realize that they are doing it for a noble purpose and that the people appreciate them," Street said during halftime of yesterday's game.
It was just hours after the mayor had been at the bedside of yet another wounded police officer, Shawn Simkins, 28, of the 14th District, wounded seriously early yesterday in Germantown as he tried to break up a robbery.
"They're doing a difficult job... and a lot of people are paying a very high price," Street said.
Smith, like injured quarterback Donovan McNabb, still needs to rest and rehabilitate his injured leg, which suffered damage to the artery. Both men have a long way to go before they come back - to the field, and, in Smith's case, to the street.
But Smith, who knows a little bit about bad breaks and overcoming adversity, is confident his dream will come true, just like it did yesterday. "I think we can go all the way," he said.
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/columnists/ronnie_polaneczky/4209735.htm
Ronnie Polaneczky | Wounded officer faces a hard road back
By Ronnie Polaneczky
[email protected]
THE GOOD news for Officer Nicholas Smith is that he didn't die in the line of duty last week.
The bad news - for him, for all of us - is that this hero cop may never patrol our streets again.
You could feel that possibility hanging in the air yesterday in the intensive care unit at Einstein Medical Center, despite the cheery and massive tribute of balloons, flowers and photos that has mushroomed across one wall of the waiting room.
That's where Smith's family and the brotherhood from the 35th District have been converging, like moths to light, not knowing where else to go with their worry.
They cautiously poke their heads into Smith's room, eager for reassurance that their strapping, 22-year-old brother in blue will be up and joking with them soon, the way he was the last time they saw him.
Smith can't always accommodate them with a response, although he managed to murmur a heartfelt "I love you" to Ed Fidler, the cop who was with him the night of the shooting and who called for backup when Smith went down.
For 10 days, Smith has been in and out of consciousness, heavily sedated while his body battles fevers, infections and blood clots.
"We keep waiting for him to have a good day," said Rosemary Corsino, Smith's mother.
"But every day it's another complication."
"It's one step forward, two steps back," said her husband, Floyd.
Indeed, the initial euphoria over Smith's survival has given way to trepidation that his injuries may forever change his life.
During his two years on the force, Smith has hardly been a reticent street cop.
His future is in jeopardy today because he's never backed away from danger.
Back in July, he helped pull a drowning child out of the Schuylkill.
And just a few weeks back, he and Fidler were knights to the rescue when some thug jumped a couple of female La Salle students.
Those same students made Smith a plate of get-well cookies when they heard of the shooting, not realizing he has yet to take his first sip of water.
Ten days ago, Smith and Fidler stopped a career criminal named Bryan Carr because they said he looked suspicious.
Carr took off down a dark Logan alley; Smith gave chase.
There was a shootout and, at the end, Smith lay injured and Carr lay dead.
In a heartbeat, one young man's life was over, another's forever altered.
But altered to what?
Thirty-fifth District Capt. Carmen Vuotto, who stopped by the hospital yesterday, as he has every day, listened as Rosemary Corsino told him of her son's mental torment.
"When he wakes up, he stares at the wall, he's so depressed. I know he's keeping everything inside," Corsino told him.
What if he can't return to the streets, he's asked his mother.
What if the extent of his injuries - a blown artery, damage to his colon and urinary tract, possible nerve damage - sideline his career only two years after it began?
"Let's take this a step at a time," Vuotto told Smith's mom.
He mentioned the names of a few police veterans shot in the line of duty - officers whose lives were also forever changed by a bullet.
They're strong, he told Corsino.
They'll talk to her son, tell him how they got through.
Rosemary Corsino nodded, but she closed her eyes.
If Smith can't be a cop - not a desk cop but a full-out, let's-roll, on-the-street crime-buster - she doesn't know what he'll do.
"It's all he ever wanted to be, from when he was a little boy," she said.
Yesterday, she was heartened that her son's condition had finally been upgraded from critical to fair.
Today, it's the condition of his future she's worried about.
http://www.nycpba.org/press-nydn/02/nydn-020215-smith.html
Female Cop Hero
Given Last Salute
She was mom, wife & cop
By MICHELE McPHEE
Daily News Police Bureau
fficer Moira Smith's smile was her emblem, as etched on her face as the claddagh — the Irish symbol of love, loyalty and friendship — was on her and her husband's gold wedding bands.
Childhood friends, family and fellow cops recalled Smith's quick grin yesterday during a memorial Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral for the only female NYPD cop killed Sept. 11.
The Valentine's Day Mass was held on what would have been Smith's 39th birthday.
Her husband, James Smith, a cop assigned to the Police Academy, told the hundreds of mourners who packed the church that the couple and their 2-year-old daughter, Patricia Mary, had watched "The Wizard of Oz" hundreds of times, but that it was only now that he has come to appreciate one of the last lines of the family's favorite movie.
"The Wizard told the Tin Man that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others," Smith said.
Judging from the thousands of cops and dignitaries — including Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki — who lined six blocks of Fifth Ave. for her service, Moira Smith must have had a big heart, he said.
Before the service began, Jim Smith and his daughter were saluted by the sea of blue-clad officers who stood at attention with white-gloved hands pressed to their temples.
As the Smith family followed the slow procession of the NYPD's Emerald Society Pipes and Drums in a black limousine, little Patricia Mary sat on her father's lap in the front seat waving to the cops as her daddy kissed her brown curls.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly pointed out that Moira Smith was miles away from the burning twin towers on the morning of Sept. 11, but had rushed to the scene, gathered victims and witnesses, and brought them back to the 13th Precinct.
She then gathered a group of cops — including her partner, Robert Fazio — and returned to the chaos and carnage of Ground Zero.
A Daily News photograph captured the hero cop leading a bloodied, dazed man to safety, one of the dozens of lives Smith is believed to have saved.
Saving One More
Her fellow cops said it was no surprise Smith went back in, again and again, to help others.
"I know if I was standing next to her screaming in her ear to run, she would have gone back in to save just one more," said one friend, 13th Precinct Officer Lissa Navarra.
Twenty-three NYPD officers never emerged from the rubble that terrible morning, Smith and her partner among them.
"They changed history," Kelly said of the fallen cops. "They changed that day from one of total defeat and devastation to one of rescue and triumph."
Kelly also pledged that the NYPD would not rest until "those who are responsible for her murder are brought to justice."
Hero cop who tried to stop
bus robbery shot dead
Posted:7:37 PM (Manila Time) | Aug. 07, 2002
INQ7.net
A TRAFFIC police officer tried to single-handedly stop five armed robbers from victimizing passengers of a Manila-bound commercial bus but was shot and stabbed dead by the assailants, a television report said Wednesday.
Police Officer 3 Oliver Benedicto wounded three of the robbers but all the five assailants were able to escape, GMA Network's "Frontpage" newscast said.
The report said the robbers boarded the Viva Aladdin bus in San Fernando, Pampanga Tuesday, and declared a hold-up. They ordered the passengers to draw the curtains of the bus and to hand in all their cellular phones, money and other valuables.
Benedicto, who was among the 11 passengers on board the bus, tried to stop the robbery and engaged the armed men in a shootout.
The policeman was on his way home to his family in Manila to celebrate his and his wife's 15th wedding anniversary on Tuesday, his wife Susan said.
Benedicto had been originally assigned to the Northern Police District in Metro Manila but was re-assigned to Pampanga.
Police officials have promised to extend financial assistance to Benedicto's family.
©2002 www.inq7.net all rights reserved
http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/4545251.htm
Mayor hosts hero cop at Birds game
Wounded officer sees romp up close
By JIM NOLAN
[email protected]
IT WASN'T EXACTLY the way Nick Smith dreamed he'd make his Veterans Stadium debut - being pushed in a wheelchair, accompanied by the mayor.
But the soft-spoken cop - who knows something about bad breaks and do-or-die situations - was happy just to be in the game.
"Being on the field was great," he said, smiling broadly, recalling well wishes from fullback Cecil Martin and Donovan McNabb before yesterday's bittersweet Eagles 38-14 plucking of the Arizona Cardinals.
"The closest I've ever been."
When he was a teen-ager, Smith, now 22, was the star running back for his township youth football team in Bensalem, Bucks County, leading it to an undefeated season one year.
As a football player, they say Smith was a little bit like Birds' running back Duce Staley: Always working. Always looking for the right time and place to make his move.
Never giving up.
Like thousands of other boys, Smith's dream of wearing Eagles green faded to fandom. So at age 19, Smith put on the blue uniform of a Philadelphia police officer. And the same skills that made him a success on the football field marked his work as a cop.
He worked in the 35th District with his partner, Ed Fidler, the Cecil Martin to his Duce, gaining ground on the drug trade in Olney corner by corner, arrest by arrest
"We gang tackled a lot of bad guys," said Fidler, 33, who escorted Smith to the game.
"We could just look at each other and know what the other guy was thinking. This guy might have a gun, this guy might have drugs. We knew how to act just by looking at each other."
On Sept. 24, Smith pursued a drug suspect down a narrow alley off Wellens Avenue. During the pursuit, the suspect, Brian Carr, turned and fired, striking Smith in the abdomen, just below his protective vest. More shots rang out and Carr was fatally wounded.
Fidler, who was circling around the other side of the alley to corner the man at Fisher Avenue, heard the shots and seconds later found Smith barely conscious in a pool of blood.
Fidler decided not to wait for an ambulance. Though he'd never played organized football before, he called an audible. He lifted his critically wounded partner, put him in the back of a squad car and rushed him along with other officers to Albert Einstein Medical Center.
Doctors later said that if Smith had been a minute later to the operating table, he would have bled to death.
Six weeks of hospital care followed, buoyed by watching the Eagles games on Sundays with Fidler and the cops from the 35th District's Squad One.
Eagles losses were a little easier to take knowing that Smith would survive to make a full recovery.
"Normally [the games] were the biggest deal," said Fidler. "But some things are bigger than football. I think 'perspective' is the word."
Commitment is another word with meaning to Nick Smith - and Mayor Street, who yesterday made good on his bedside promise to host the hero cop and his partner in his box at the Vet.
"It's awfully important for people in this line of work, who risk their lives everyday, to realize that they are doing it for a noble purpose and that the people appreciate them," Street said during halftime of yesterday's game.
It was just hours after the mayor had been at the bedside of yet another wounded police officer, Shawn Simkins, 28, of the 14th District, wounded seriously early yesterday in Germantown as he tried to break up a robbery.
"They're doing a difficult job... and a lot of people are paying a very high price," Street said.
Smith, like injured quarterback Donovan McNabb, still needs to rest and rehabilitate his injured leg, which suffered damage to the artery. Both men have a long way to go before they come back - to the field, and, in Smith's case, to the street.
But Smith, who knows a little bit about bad breaks and overcoming adversity, is confident his dream will come true, just like it did yesterday. "I think we can go all the way," he said.
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/columnists/ronnie_polaneczky/4209735.htm
Ronnie Polaneczky | Wounded officer faces a hard road back
By Ronnie Polaneczky
[email protected]
THE GOOD news for Officer Nicholas Smith is that he didn't die in the line of duty last week.
The bad news - for him, for all of us - is that this hero cop may never patrol our streets again.
You could feel that possibility hanging in the air yesterday in the intensive care unit at Einstein Medical Center, despite the cheery and massive tribute of balloons, flowers and photos that has mushroomed across one wall of the waiting room.
That's where Smith's family and the brotherhood from the 35th District have been converging, like moths to light, not knowing where else to go with their worry.
They cautiously poke their heads into Smith's room, eager for reassurance that their strapping, 22-year-old brother in blue will be up and joking with them soon, the way he was the last time they saw him.
Smith can't always accommodate them with a response, although he managed to murmur a heartfelt "I love you" to Ed Fidler, the cop who was with him the night of the shooting and who called for backup when Smith went down.
For 10 days, Smith has been in and out of consciousness, heavily sedated while his body battles fevers, infections and blood clots.
"We keep waiting for him to have a good day," said Rosemary Corsino, Smith's mother.
"But every day it's another complication."
"It's one step forward, two steps back," said her husband, Floyd.
Indeed, the initial euphoria over Smith's survival has given way to trepidation that his injuries may forever change his life.
During his two years on the force, Smith has hardly been a reticent street cop.
His future is in jeopardy today because he's never backed away from danger.
Back in July, he helped pull a drowning child out of the Schuylkill.
And just a few weeks back, he and Fidler were knights to the rescue when some thug jumped a couple of female La Salle students.
Those same students made Smith a plate of get-well cookies when they heard of the shooting, not realizing he has yet to take his first sip of water.
Ten days ago, Smith and Fidler stopped a career criminal named Bryan Carr because they said he looked suspicious.
Carr took off down a dark Logan alley; Smith gave chase.
There was a shootout and, at the end, Smith lay injured and Carr lay dead.
In a heartbeat, one young man's life was over, another's forever altered.
But altered to what?
Thirty-fifth District Capt. Carmen Vuotto, who stopped by the hospital yesterday, as he has every day, listened as Rosemary Corsino told him of her son's mental torment.
"When he wakes up, he stares at the wall, he's so depressed. I know he's keeping everything inside," Corsino told him.
What if he can't return to the streets, he's asked his mother.
What if the extent of his injuries - a blown artery, damage to his colon and urinary tract, possible nerve damage - sideline his career only two years after it began?
"Let's take this a step at a time," Vuotto told Smith's mom.
He mentioned the names of a few police veterans shot in the line of duty - officers whose lives were also forever changed by a bullet.
They're strong, he told Corsino.
They'll talk to her son, tell him how they got through.
Rosemary Corsino nodded, but she closed her eyes.
If Smith can't be a cop - not a desk cop but a full-out, let's-roll, on-the-street crime-buster - she doesn't know what he'll do.
"It's all he ever wanted to be, from when he was a little boy," she said.
Yesterday, she was heartened that her son's condition had finally been upgraded from critical to fair.
Today, it's the condition of his future she's worried about.
http://www.nycpba.org/press-nydn/02/nydn-020215-smith.html
Female Cop Hero
Given Last Salute
She was mom, wife & cop
By MICHELE McPHEE
Daily News Police Bureau
fficer Moira Smith's smile was her emblem, as etched on her face as the claddagh — the Irish symbol of love, loyalty and friendship — was on her and her husband's gold wedding bands.
Childhood friends, family and fellow cops recalled Smith's quick grin yesterday during a memorial Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral for the only female NYPD cop killed Sept. 11.
The Valentine's Day Mass was held on what would have been Smith's 39th birthday.
Her husband, James Smith, a cop assigned to the Police Academy, told the hundreds of mourners who packed the church that the couple and their 2-year-old daughter, Patricia Mary, had watched "The Wizard of Oz" hundreds of times, but that it was only now that he has come to appreciate one of the last lines of the family's favorite movie.
"The Wizard told the Tin Man that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others," Smith said.
Judging from the thousands of cops and dignitaries — including Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki — who lined six blocks of Fifth Ave. for her service, Moira Smith must have had a big heart, he said.
Before the service began, Jim Smith and his daughter were saluted by the sea of blue-clad officers who stood at attention with white-gloved hands pressed to their temples.
As the Smith family followed the slow procession of the NYPD's Emerald Society Pipes and Drums in a black limousine, little Patricia Mary sat on her father's lap in the front seat waving to the cops as her daddy kissed her brown curls.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly pointed out that Moira Smith was miles away from the burning twin towers on the morning of Sept. 11, but had rushed to the scene, gathered victims and witnesses, and brought them back to the 13th Precinct.
She then gathered a group of cops — including her partner, Robert Fazio — and returned to the chaos and carnage of Ground Zero.
A Daily News photograph captured the hero cop leading a bloodied, dazed man to safety, one of the dozens of lives Smith is believed to have saved.
Saving One More
Her fellow cops said it was no surprise Smith went back in, again and again, to help others.
"I know if I was standing next to her screaming in her ear to run, she would have gone back in to save just one more," said one friend, 13th Precinct Officer Lissa Navarra.
Twenty-three NYPD officers never emerged from the rubble that terrible morning, Smith and her partner among them.
"They changed history," Kelly said of the fallen cops. "They changed that day from one of total defeat and devastation to one of rescue and triumph."
Kelly also pledged that the NYPD would not rest until "those who are responsible for her murder are brought to justice."
