An off-duty NYPD officer, after literally dodging a bullet, shot a would-be carjacker early Wednesday in a Brooklyn gunfight where the oft-arrested assailant ignored shouted commands to drop the weapon, cops and a witness said.
The officer came face to face with the crook while stopped at a red light in Canarsie on his way home from the night shift, with the man using his gun to tap on the driver’s side window at E. 87th St. and Foster Ave. just after 2 a.m., police said. The startled cop pulled through the intersection and stopped at the opposite corner.
Video shows the gunman walking toward the car as the officer scrambled to get out of his vehicle. The carjacker appeared to open the driver’s side door and fired once, narrowly missing the officer, said NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison at a news conference.
A witness told the Daily News the officer climbed out of the car and shouted at the gunman to drop his weapon — followed by a half-dozen gunshots.
“He actually said to the guy, ‘Put the gun down, put the gun down,'” said the neighbor awakened by the first gunshot. “He was yelling for the guy to put the gun down and I guess he didn’t listen. And they exchanged some more gunfire … (The officer) was literally screaming for help.”
The cop returned fire several times, wounding the gunman in the chest and arm, Harrison said. The gunman was rushed to Brookdale University Hospital with what Harrison called “life-threatening injuries.”
A relative of the suspect said he was shot nine times but had stabilized after undergoing surgery.
The wounded 28-year-old man, identified by family members as Ahmad Nicholls, was arrested just last year in a vehicular manslaughter case where he was allegedly driving drunk at more than 100 mph on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, authorities said. His lengthy rap sheet includes 24 prior arrests, according to police.
Nicholls was unaware that he targeted a police officer Thursday, and the confrontation escalated quickly from there, police said. Two guns, one apparently covered in blood, were recovered at the scene along with a knife.
“I was downstairs sleeping,” said another neighborhood resident. “It was pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! It was loud, too.”
In the prior fatal car crash, Nicholls was allegedly speeding along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway when he plowed into two cars, including one carrying two kids, their mom and their grandmother on Oct. 15, 2017, officials said. The grandmother died from her injuries about six months later, and eight other people were injured.
Nicholls fled the crash scene, called his girlfriend and asked her to report the car he was driving as stolen, prosecutors said. He was arrested more than a year later in April 2019 and released on $250,000 bail.
The suspect’s relatives were stunned to hear of the shooting, with Nicholls’ cousin saying she believed he was still staying with family in Georgia.
“He’s in Atlanta, he comes here, and he gets in this kind of problem?” said Lynn Simon. “This whole carjacking situation doesn’t sound right to me. Ahmad has his own vehicle. He has no reason to steal a car. It doesn’t make sense.”
Simon said she heard from other family members that Nicholls had an argument with another man inside a bar or a club before the shooting, but had no idea how that morphed into a gunfight with a police officer.
The cousin acknowledged that Nicholls ran with the wrong crowd when younger, although he never did any prison time.
“If he had a history … he’d be serving time for something,” she said. “So I don’t understand too much about that, because he’s always free. He’s always happy-go-lucky. He comes, he checks on everybody, and then he’s gone.”
The officer was treated at Mount Sinai Brooklyn for ringing in his ears.
Local resident Chris Saint, 27, said the intersection near a BJ’s store was the scene of a few prior carjackings — adding he was mugged there at gunpoint five years ago.
“This happens a lot around here,” he said, gesturing toward the store’s parking lot. “This area’s pretty dead, so this happens … Coming home last night, I just had a feeling something was going on.”