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On Monday evening, Mott Avenue in Far Rockaway was busy as usual in the fading sunshine. People hurried past a library, a Caribbean takeout spot, a juice bar. Traffic crept along, but one car stood out by staying still, illegally parked in a bus stop.
A police patrol car slowed to a stop, and two officers stepped out and approached.
One officer, Jonathan Diller, 31, had been on the job three years. Wearing his uniform’s snug bullet-resistant vest, he peered toward the vehicle and noticed two people, a driver and a passenger.
The bright storefront of a Jackson Hewitt, a few doors down, advertised tax services. Inside, Tanya Jones, 42, the manager, looked up from behind her desk when the door opened — it was her children, stopping to show her toys they’d bought nearby. The block was always teeming with neighborhood boys and girls after school.
Her children returned outside.
In the street, Officer Diller approached the parked car and called for the passenger to step out. No response. He called out again. Nothing.
Older officers, retired officers will tell you: This is the worst part of the job. It’s facing the potential danger of walking up to a parked car or an apartment door, with no real idea of what’s happening inside.
In this instance, witnesses, officials and recordings of emergency calls coming over the police scanner give a fragmentary account of what happened on Monday.
Officer Diller shouted at the passenger: Take your hands out of your pockets.
Then Mott Avenue exploded in a gunfight.
The passenger fired first, the police said later, striking Officer Diller. The round hit him just below the vest in the torso, a grave wound.
His partner, Officer Veckash Khedna, returned fire, hitting the passenger, Guy Rivera, 34, the police said. There had been maybe five shots fired in all, witnesses said later. It was a seconds-long gunfight without warning.
Panic and chaos gripped the block. In the tax office, Ms. Jones heard the shots from behind her desk, her mind racing: my kids. Are they OK? Were they near?
Strangers dashed inside and hit the deck. Ms. Jones rose and locked the door.
Outside, a woman fell to the street. A young man standing in front of Alizé Clothing pulled the woman inside, past the mannequins in the front window.
Nelson Cruz, 46, a chauffeur, sat stunned in his sedan down the block. He waited until the gunfire seemed to have stopped, and then stepped out and began to record with his phone. The fallen officer’s partner was in the middle of the street, yelling — for help, it seemed to the chauffeur.
Officers sped to Mott Street, and then more and more arrived — Mr. Cruz had never seen so many. People on the sidewalk pointed toward the wounded officer.
“Central, we need a bus here ASAP!” an officer shouted into his radio, using police jargon for an ambulance.
Even as the dispatcher sought confirmation on where the shooting happened, officers asked that traffic on the nearby Van Wyck Expressway be blocked. They needed a clear path for the ambulance carrying the fallen officer to get to Jamaica Hospital nine miles away.
At the same time, lifesaving measures were underway at the scene. “Put pressure on his chest!” someone shouted into the radio.
“The service road is clear!” an officer announced. “You have free flowing traffic on the service road.”
Police helicopters now hovered overhead as dusk became night.
Officer Diller’s ambulance pulled into the hospital. Another ambulance carried Mr. Rivera, the car passenger who the police said had shot him, also injured.
Officer Diller’s gunshot wound proved fatal.
By night’s end, his body would be placed on a stretcher beneath a police flag and carried outside, past scores of officers. He was married and had a young son.
The police were holding Mr. Rivera and the driver, Lindy Jones, 41, on Tuesday. Charges were expected.
The police are trained to understand that a traffic stop can be unpredictable when an officer knows next to nothing about the occupants of a vehicle. This mind-set has been analyzed and criticized after motorists have been harmed or harassed without provocation.
But when the people in a car intend harm, they “hold all the cards,” said Michael Prate, 60, a retired officer who worked in Brooklyn.
“He knows he has a gun on him and he’s making a choice in his mind,” he said. “Am I going to ditch that gun in the back seat? Or am I going to spring?”
His own son is a police officer, with the same time on the job — three years — that Officer Diller had. “He was off yesterday,” Mr. Prate said. “We talked back and forth. He’s in a unit that’s doing that — he’s doing car stops all the time. I pound home how safe you have to be, how careful you have to be.”
On Tuesday morning, Ms. Jones arrived for work at the tax office. She was relieved that her children were fine, safe. But she worried for the neighborhood.
Her ears were still ringing.
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