Manedwolf
member
Except they screwed up and called the officer's off-duty pistol a "KHR"...shouldn't that be a Kahr?
New York Times, December 11, 2005
Officer Dies Interrupting Burglary Near Bronx Home; Actor Is Held
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
A police officer trying to stop a burglary in a neighbor's home was fatally wounded in a gun battle in the Bronx early yesterday, but continued to return fire and wounded two suspects who were captured by arriving officers as they stumbled away bleeding, the police said.
The slain officer, Daniel Enchautegui, 28, was the second city police officer to die in the line of duty this year, and, as with the first, less than two weeks ago, the police said he had stayed in the fight despite a mortal wound near his heart, to aid in the capture of his assailants.
The suspects - Steven Armento, 48, a burglar with three convictions and a history of violence, and Lillo Brancato Jr., 29, an actor who has appeared in "The Sopranos" and in "A Bronx Tale" with Robert De Niro and a dozen later films - were felled by multiple wounds in a gunfight that shattered the peace of a residential street before dawn.
Law enforcement officials said last night that both suspects had made self-incriminating statements and that Mr. Armento had admitted shooting the officer. They also said the men had planned to rob a drug dealer but had hit the wrong house, one that was vacant except for two second-story tenants, and had come away with nothing.
Both suspects live in Yonkers, where the police and neighbors said they had histories involving drugs, guns, fights, thefts and other trouble. The ties between the two were murky, but a neighbor said that Mr. Brancato had dated a daughter of Mr. Armento. The neighbor also that Mr. Armento had stalked his neighborhood with a pit bull and a gun, and that Mr. Brancato - who had portrayed mob wannabes in movies and on television - had a well-developed tough-guy swagger.
In what has become a somber ritual, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg went to the scene of the shooting, to the hospital where the officer died and to the home of the officer's parents. And as the Police Department mourned, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Bloomberg spoke once more of the sacrifices made by valiant officers who put their lives on the line.
"In the space of two weeks, we've twice witnessed the almost incomprehensible courage of police officers who, although mortally wounded, stayed in the fight to help bring their killers to justice," Mr. Kelly said at a news conference at Jacobi Medical Center. Besides Officer Enchautegui, he was referring to Officer Dillon Stewart, who, though shot in the heart by a suspect in Brooklyn on Nov. 28, drove in pursuit of his assailant for blocks before collapsing.
"He did everything he could, just as he was trained to do," Mayor Bloomberg said of Officer Enchautegui (pronounced EN-cha-tay-gee). "This is a devastating loss to the department and the city, still recovering from the loss of Dillon Stewart right after Thanksgiving. We now have another life to mourn, taken from us at a young age for no sensible reason."
The battle yesterday unfolded on Arnow Place near Westchester Avenue in Pelham Bay about 5:20 a.m., the police said, after Officer Enchautegui, who had been on the force for three years and worked in the 40th Precinct in the Bronx, was awakened in his basement apartment at 3117 Arnow by the clatter of breaking glass.
Officer Enchautegui, who had been off duty for little more than five hours after working a 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift, got up and called his landlord, Henry Dziedzic, upstairs and asked if he had heard the breaking of glass. The landlord said that he had not.
The officer put on a black winter coat, slung his police shield around his neck, took his cellphone and off-duty pistol, an eight-shot KHR semiautomatic, and went out to investigate, Commissioner Kelly said. On the side of the house next door, at 3119 Arnow, he saw that a basement window had been broken.
Officer Enchautegui immediately called 911 for backup officers. Following procedure, the police said, he calmly identified himself as an officer and said he was investigating a possible burglary next door. He also noted that he was armed and was wearing his shield on a necklace, and he described his black coat so that he would not be mistaken for a burglar and possibly shot by fellow officers, the police said.
As Officer Enchautegui waited on the tree-lined street of red-brick homes, two men, one of them armed, emerged from the house he had under surveillance.
"Police! Don't move! Police! Don't move!" Officer Enchautegui shouted, loud enough for his landlord to hear.
Investigators - who said they had pieced together an account of what happened from evidence at the scene and from neighbors' descriptions of the sequence of gunfire - said that the armed suspect, identified as Mr. Armento, a parolee with three convictions for burglary and possession of stolen property, had fired first, with a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver.
The bullet struck Officer Enchautegui in the left chest, but he responded with at least six shots, investigators said, striking Mr. Brancato twice in the chest and Mr. Armento four times in the abdomen, chest, right leg and groin, before collapsing.
As the officer went down in his driveway, the wounded assailants hobbled west toward Westchester Avenue, a half block away, where two officers had just pulled up in a patrol car, responding to Officer Enchautegui's 911 call.
They first spotted Mr. Brancato beside a silver, late-model Dodge Durango, parked on Westchester Avenue. He was bleeding onto the door handle and into the street. They searched him, found no weapon, and arrested him.
The officers then turned into Arnow Place and saw Mr. Armento running at them with a gun in his hand, according to the police. He, too, was bleeding. The officers took cover, one behind a parked car and the other behind the corner of a building, and shouted at the approaching gunman: "Stop! Police! Drop the gun!"
At that, the man dropped his weapon and collapsed in the street, about 50 feet from the officers.
Back at the shooting scene, another officer and a sergeant found Officer Enchautegui, lying face up and bleeding in his driveway. He was breathing shallowly, apparently near death, and appeared to be unconscious. Emergency service officers administered cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, and he was taken by ambulance to Jacobi Medical Center, where further efforts to revive him failed. He was pronounced dead at 6:09 a.m.
"This speaks to the unequal sacrifice that the men and women of this department are willing to make," Commissioner Kelly said later.
The two suspects were also taken to Jacobi, where they were in serious condition.
Police scoured the neighborhood for other suspects, using dogs and a helicopter, and subway trains on the No. 6 elevated line, whose tracks run along Westchester Avenue, were halted, but no other suspects were found.
The shooting stunned residents of Pelham Bay. Murray Walsh, 65, was watching television when he heard shots, a rare occurrence in the area, which he described as safe and diverse. "It's a beautiful, quiet neighborhood," he said. "Everybody lives here. We got Italians, Chinese, Greek, Spanish, Eastern European."
Though he was not on duty, Officer Enchautegui was acting in the line of duty in facing the men who killed him, the police said. He thus became the second city officer killed in the line of duty this year, and the ninth shot in the line of duty in 2005.
On Nov. 28, Officer Stewart, 35, a five-year veteran of the force, was fatally shot through the heart while pursuing a driver who ran a red light. The authorities said that as the officer drew up alongside the suspect's car, the gunman fired five shots into his unmarked patrol car. The suspect, Allan Cameron, 27, wanted on drug and assault charges, was seized in an apartment nearby and has been charged with first-degree murder, and attempted murder in the Nov. 19 shooting of Wiener Philippe, 26, an off-duty officer who was robbed.
Officer Enchautegui joined the force in July 2002 and was first assigned to the 52nd Precinct in the Bronx. After a short time on what officers call an "impact post" - a beat where heavy criminal activity requires extra patrols - he was transferred to the 40th Precinct, which covers the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx.
He was unmarried and is survived by his parents and a sister, the authorities said. He lived with his parents, Maria Rosa and Pedro Enchautegui, at 1154 Bryant Avenue in the Bronx until two years ago, when he rented the basement of Mr. Dziedzic's two-story home. Bounded by Bruckner Boulevard on the east and Westchester Avenue on the west, Pelham Bay is a quiet neighborhood of short streets and two-story homes, some with porches and awnings, where many residents put out Christmas decorations.
Friends said Officer Enchautegui visited his parents almost every day, and often escorted his father, who has been ill, to medical appointments. The officer, who was Hispanic and spoke Spanish fluently, was described by Mr. Dziedzic as a conscientious, friendly tenant.
All the officers who responded to the shooting yesterday wore black elastic mourning bands across their shields in memory of Officer Stewart. By tradition, officers wear the bands for about a month after an officer dies in the line of duty.
Mr. Brancato, in a moderately successful acting career, got his break in "A Bronx Tale," Mr. De Niro's 1993 coming-of-age film about a teenager torn between two role models - his father (Mr. De Niro) and a local mobster (Chazz Palminteri) - in an Italian neighborhood.
A 1993 profile in The New York Times said he had the dese-and-dose speech and swagger of Johnny Boy, a character in Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" that had made a star of Mr. De Niro a generation earlier. "A handsome young man with powerful angles in his face and a pug's crooked nose, he could, in fact, pass for a De Niro scion," the profile said. "He's friendly, earnest, sweet-tempered, a fast talker, a salesman, the kind of goofy tough guy that once upon a time used to hang out on a city street corner but now you'd find in the mall."
Born in Bogota, Colombia, and raised by adoptive parents in Yonkers, Mr. Brancato appeared in more than a dozen films, including "Renaissance Man," "Crimson Tide," "Enemy of the State," and "The Adventures of Pluto Nash." He also played a mob wannabe, Matt Bevilacqua, in the 1999-2000 season of "The Sopranos," a recurring role that ended with a memorable departure - his execution by the fictional mob boss, Tony Soprano. He also appeared in the short-lived mob show "Falcone," and guest-starred in a 2002 episode of "NYPD Blue."
Mr. Brancato's most recent appearance was in court last June after he was arrested by Yonkers officers who, in a routine traffic stop, said they found four envelopes of heroin in his possession. The disposition of that case was unclear yesterday. The police were called to a domestic dispute at his home at 55 Rushby Way last week, according to neighbors who said that the officers had found crack cocaine in his pocket. But there was no record of an arrest.
The police said Mr. Armento had a history of 13 arrests on weapons, drugs, burglary and other charges and three convictions that led to prison terms. A neighbor said she had obtained an order of protection against Mr. Armento after he had fired a shot at her heart and after his pit bull had attacked her fiancé. The police said he was currently on parole, and had been running with the murder weapon when captured, an assertion that will require ballistic tests to confirm.
There were no immediate plans to arraign either of the hospitalized suspects, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney's office said.
Besides Officers Enchautegui and Stewart, at least seven city officers have been killed in the line of duty since Sept. 11, 2001.
Last Tuesday, two New York State troopers were shot and a drug suspect was killed in a shootout during a raid on a home in the Bronx. One trooper was shot in the leg and the other escaped serious injury when two bullets struck his protective armor. Both were part of a heavily armed SWAT team of investigators from the Westchester County district attorney's office, the F.B.I. and other agencies.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Al Baker, Nicholas Confessore, Kareem Fahim, Manny Fernandez, Janon Fisher and Matthew Sweeney.
New York Times, December 11, 2005
Officer Dies Interrupting Burglary Near Bronx Home; Actor Is Held
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
A police officer trying to stop a burglary in a neighbor's home was fatally wounded in a gun battle in the Bronx early yesterday, but continued to return fire and wounded two suspects who were captured by arriving officers as they stumbled away bleeding, the police said.
The slain officer, Daniel Enchautegui, 28, was the second city police officer to die in the line of duty this year, and, as with the first, less than two weeks ago, the police said he had stayed in the fight despite a mortal wound near his heart, to aid in the capture of his assailants.
The suspects - Steven Armento, 48, a burglar with three convictions and a history of violence, and Lillo Brancato Jr., 29, an actor who has appeared in "The Sopranos" and in "A Bronx Tale" with Robert De Niro and a dozen later films - were felled by multiple wounds in a gunfight that shattered the peace of a residential street before dawn.
Law enforcement officials said last night that both suspects had made self-incriminating statements and that Mr. Armento had admitted shooting the officer. They also said the men had planned to rob a drug dealer but had hit the wrong house, one that was vacant except for two second-story tenants, and had come away with nothing.
Both suspects live in Yonkers, where the police and neighbors said they had histories involving drugs, guns, fights, thefts and other trouble. The ties between the two were murky, but a neighbor said that Mr. Brancato had dated a daughter of Mr. Armento. The neighbor also that Mr. Armento had stalked his neighborhood with a pit bull and a gun, and that Mr. Brancato - who had portrayed mob wannabes in movies and on television - had a well-developed tough-guy swagger.
In what has become a somber ritual, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg went to the scene of the shooting, to the hospital where the officer died and to the home of the officer's parents. And as the Police Department mourned, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Bloomberg spoke once more of the sacrifices made by valiant officers who put their lives on the line.
"In the space of two weeks, we've twice witnessed the almost incomprehensible courage of police officers who, although mortally wounded, stayed in the fight to help bring their killers to justice," Mr. Kelly said at a news conference at Jacobi Medical Center. Besides Officer Enchautegui, he was referring to Officer Dillon Stewart, who, though shot in the heart by a suspect in Brooklyn on Nov. 28, drove in pursuit of his assailant for blocks before collapsing.
"He did everything he could, just as he was trained to do," Mayor Bloomberg said of Officer Enchautegui (pronounced EN-cha-tay-gee). "This is a devastating loss to the department and the city, still recovering from the loss of Dillon Stewart right after Thanksgiving. We now have another life to mourn, taken from us at a young age for no sensible reason."
The battle yesterday unfolded on Arnow Place near Westchester Avenue in Pelham Bay about 5:20 a.m., the police said, after Officer Enchautegui, who had been on the force for three years and worked in the 40th Precinct in the Bronx, was awakened in his basement apartment at 3117 Arnow by the clatter of breaking glass.
Officer Enchautegui, who had been off duty for little more than five hours after working a 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift, got up and called his landlord, Henry Dziedzic, upstairs and asked if he had heard the breaking of glass. The landlord said that he had not.
The officer put on a black winter coat, slung his police shield around his neck, took his cellphone and off-duty pistol, an eight-shot KHR semiautomatic, and went out to investigate, Commissioner Kelly said. On the side of the house next door, at 3119 Arnow, he saw that a basement window had been broken.
Officer Enchautegui immediately called 911 for backup officers. Following procedure, the police said, he calmly identified himself as an officer and said he was investigating a possible burglary next door. He also noted that he was armed and was wearing his shield on a necklace, and he described his black coat so that he would not be mistaken for a burglar and possibly shot by fellow officers, the police said.
As Officer Enchautegui waited on the tree-lined street of red-brick homes, two men, one of them armed, emerged from the house he had under surveillance.
"Police! Don't move! Police! Don't move!" Officer Enchautegui shouted, loud enough for his landlord to hear.
Investigators - who said they had pieced together an account of what happened from evidence at the scene and from neighbors' descriptions of the sequence of gunfire - said that the armed suspect, identified as Mr. Armento, a parolee with three convictions for burglary and possession of stolen property, had fired first, with a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver.
The bullet struck Officer Enchautegui in the left chest, but he responded with at least six shots, investigators said, striking Mr. Brancato twice in the chest and Mr. Armento four times in the abdomen, chest, right leg and groin, before collapsing.
As the officer went down in his driveway, the wounded assailants hobbled west toward Westchester Avenue, a half block away, where two officers had just pulled up in a patrol car, responding to Officer Enchautegui's 911 call.
They first spotted Mr. Brancato beside a silver, late-model Dodge Durango, parked on Westchester Avenue. He was bleeding onto the door handle and into the street. They searched him, found no weapon, and arrested him.
The officers then turned into Arnow Place and saw Mr. Armento running at them with a gun in his hand, according to the police. He, too, was bleeding. The officers took cover, one behind a parked car and the other behind the corner of a building, and shouted at the approaching gunman: "Stop! Police! Drop the gun!"
At that, the man dropped his weapon and collapsed in the street, about 50 feet from the officers.
Back at the shooting scene, another officer and a sergeant found Officer Enchautegui, lying face up and bleeding in his driveway. He was breathing shallowly, apparently near death, and appeared to be unconscious. Emergency service officers administered cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, and he was taken by ambulance to Jacobi Medical Center, where further efforts to revive him failed. He was pronounced dead at 6:09 a.m.
"This speaks to the unequal sacrifice that the men and women of this department are willing to make," Commissioner Kelly said later.
The two suspects were also taken to Jacobi, where they were in serious condition.
Police scoured the neighborhood for other suspects, using dogs and a helicopter, and subway trains on the No. 6 elevated line, whose tracks run along Westchester Avenue, were halted, but no other suspects were found.
The shooting stunned residents of Pelham Bay. Murray Walsh, 65, was watching television when he heard shots, a rare occurrence in the area, which he described as safe and diverse. "It's a beautiful, quiet neighborhood," he said. "Everybody lives here. We got Italians, Chinese, Greek, Spanish, Eastern European."
Though he was not on duty, Officer Enchautegui was acting in the line of duty in facing the men who killed him, the police said. He thus became the second city officer killed in the line of duty this year, and the ninth shot in the line of duty in 2005.
On Nov. 28, Officer Stewart, 35, a five-year veteran of the force, was fatally shot through the heart while pursuing a driver who ran a red light. The authorities said that as the officer drew up alongside the suspect's car, the gunman fired five shots into his unmarked patrol car. The suspect, Allan Cameron, 27, wanted on drug and assault charges, was seized in an apartment nearby and has been charged with first-degree murder, and attempted murder in the Nov. 19 shooting of Wiener Philippe, 26, an off-duty officer who was robbed.
Officer Enchautegui joined the force in July 2002 and was first assigned to the 52nd Precinct in the Bronx. After a short time on what officers call an "impact post" - a beat where heavy criminal activity requires extra patrols - he was transferred to the 40th Precinct, which covers the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx.
He was unmarried and is survived by his parents and a sister, the authorities said. He lived with his parents, Maria Rosa and Pedro Enchautegui, at 1154 Bryant Avenue in the Bronx until two years ago, when he rented the basement of Mr. Dziedzic's two-story home. Bounded by Bruckner Boulevard on the east and Westchester Avenue on the west, Pelham Bay is a quiet neighborhood of short streets and two-story homes, some with porches and awnings, where many residents put out Christmas decorations.
Friends said Officer Enchautegui visited his parents almost every day, and often escorted his father, who has been ill, to medical appointments. The officer, who was Hispanic and spoke Spanish fluently, was described by Mr. Dziedzic as a conscientious, friendly tenant.
All the officers who responded to the shooting yesterday wore black elastic mourning bands across their shields in memory of Officer Stewart. By tradition, officers wear the bands for about a month after an officer dies in the line of duty.
Mr. Brancato, in a moderately successful acting career, got his break in "A Bronx Tale," Mr. De Niro's 1993 coming-of-age film about a teenager torn between two role models - his father (Mr. De Niro) and a local mobster (Chazz Palminteri) - in an Italian neighborhood.
A 1993 profile in The New York Times said he had the dese-and-dose speech and swagger of Johnny Boy, a character in Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" that had made a star of Mr. De Niro a generation earlier. "A handsome young man with powerful angles in his face and a pug's crooked nose, he could, in fact, pass for a De Niro scion," the profile said. "He's friendly, earnest, sweet-tempered, a fast talker, a salesman, the kind of goofy tough guy that once upon a time used to hang out on a city street corner but now you'd find in the mall."
Born in Bogota, Colombia, and raised by adoptive parents in Yonkers, Mr. Brancato appeared in more than a dozen films, including "Renaissance Man," "Crimson Tide," "Enemy of the State," and "The Adventures of Pluto Nash." He also played a mob wannabe, Matt Bevilacqua, in the 1999-2000 season of "The Sopranos," a recurring role that ended with a memorable departure - his execution by the fictional mob boss, Tony Soprano. He also appeared in the short-lived mob show "Falcone," and guest-starred in a 2002 episode of "NYPD Blue."
Mr. Brancato's most recent appearance was in court last June after he was arrested by Yonkers officers who, in a routine traffic stop, said they found four envelopes of heroin in his possession. The disposition of that case was unclear yesterday. The police were called to a domestic dispute at his home at 55 Rushby Way last week, according to neighbors who said that the officers had found crack cocaine in his pocket. But there was no record of an arrest.
The police said Mr. Armento had a history of 13 arrests on weapons, drugs, burglary and other charges and three convictions that led to prison terms. A neighbor said she had obtained an order of protection against Mr. Armento after he had fired a shot at her heart and after his pit bull had attacked her fiancé. The police said he was currently on parole, and had been running with the murder weapon when captured, an assertion that will require ballistic tests to confirm.
There were no immediate plans to arraign either of the hospitalized suspects, a spokesman for the Bronx district attorney's office said.
Besides Officers Enchautegui and Stewart, at least seven city officers have been killed in the line of duty since Sept. 11, 2001.
Last Tuesday, two New York State troopers were shot and a drug suspect was killed in a shootout during a raid on a home in the Bronx. One trooper was shot in the leg and the other escaped serious injury when two bullets struck his protective armor. Both were part of a heavily armed SWAT team of investigators from the Westchester County district attorney's office, the F.B.I. and other agencies.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Al Baker, Nicholas Confessore, Kareem Fahim, Manny Fernandez, Janon Fisher and Matthew Sweeney.
