At a press conference late last night, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly held aloft the bullet that struck Officer Kevin Brennan, 29, a six-year veteran of the NYPD, in Bushwick last night. "He’s one lucky young man," Kelly told reporters, holding a jar containing the bloody bullet that doctors removed from Brennan's skull. "It's a miracle. He's very, very lucky." Brennan was shot once in the face, according to the Times, as he chased a suspected gunman into the Bushwick Houses project last night around 9 p.m. He's expected to make a full recovery.
Brennan was responding along with two other officers to a report of a man with a gun. As they arrived at the scene, they confronted Luis "Baby" Ortiz and two other men; the Daily News reports the cops recognized Ortiz from a previous arrest, and Ortiz ran. Brennan followed him into one of the buildings, and the door locked behind him. Once inside, Ortiz allegedly fired two shots at Brennan, hitting him once. Brennan squeezed off one round, but did not strike Ortiz. "The hurt cop kept yelling ‘I got hit! I got hit!’ " one witness tells the News. "He was bleeding from the mouth."
The other officers quickly came to his aid, and one resident tells the Post, "I saw the cop on the floor. He was bleeding from the head. There was a lot of blood." Brennan was rushed to Bellevue hospital behind a massive police motorcade, while hundreds of cops descended on the scene to search for the perp. Within a couple of hours they found Ortiz at his uncle’s apartment on Bushwick Avenue, and police say the gun was located outside after Ortiz threw it out the window. Sources tell the Post Ortiz was wanted for questioning in the slaying of Andrew Brown, 45, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was the first homicide in NYC this year.
