A shotgun lying on the street in the foreground heightens the dramatic tension of the scene as Ptl. Stephen Gilroy lies dead on the curb. At the right, near the open cruiser door, Ptl. Brian Tuohy gives medical aid to Ptl. Frank Carpentier, fashioning a tourniquet from the wounded officer’s belt and applying it to his leg. The officer taking cover behind the lamppost is unidentified.

“I saw a piece of my mother’s soul deteriorate before my eyes as police officers told her, ‘Your brother Stephen was killed.’ ”

You’re a recruit in the Police Academy and you hear the name: Stephen Gilroy. Then, you’re a rookie police officer walking into Brooklyn North’s 90 Pct. for the first time, and you hear lots of things from the veterans — war stories, cautionary tales, what bosses to beware of — and that name again: Stephen Gilroy, because, by coincidence, the 90 stationhouse is right next door to where he had worked.

When you go next door, to ESU Truck 8 headquarters, you see that name on a plaque placed there in his honor, citing how he was killed in the line of duty on Jan. 19, 1973.

PBA President Pat Lynch, in June 1984, went through that rite of passage at the 90 — like many others before and after him — and it resonated with him, as it did with the others. Gilroy had been killed responding to a Brooklyn sporting goods store where four men had taken 12 hostages and a cache of deadly weapons. The ordeal — the worst hostage situation in the city’s history — lasted 47 hours and before it was over, the captives were terrorized, two cops were wounded and Gilroy was dead.

“There’s a head popping out from the el pillar,” the Remington rifle-toting hostage-taker named Shuaib A. Raheem told his armed-to-the-hilt fellow criminals. “Shoot when you see it.”

They did, and Patrolman Gilroy was the fatal target.

“We killed a cop,” Raheem menaced the hostages, following a radio report of Gilroy’s death. “We can kill anyone else we want now.”

But, ultimately, the killers were captured without further bloodshed and sentenced to long prison terms. However, the story didn’t end there.

Fast forward 35 years and imagine what thoughts were going through the minds of Pat Lynch and other police officers when they learned last November that the state parole board had, by a 2-1 vote, approved Raheem’s release from prison, effective Jan. 3, 2008. The PBA machine had to move quickly.

A Nov. 27 lawyers’ letter to the board pointed out that Raheem’s release was approved without giving Gilroy’s widow, Patricia Gilroy, and other relatives and surviving hostages the chance to make victims’ impact statements before the board, which they were legally entitled to do. The PBA also tipped off the media to let the public know that an injustice was in the works. Phil Messing of The New York Post was journalistically savvy enough to break the story and other news outlets caught on.

“We don’t believe a cop-killer should ever again walk the streets in freedom,” Lynch said in numerous statements to the press. “It should also not be forgotten that this man was convicted of kidnapping as well. He put innocent hostages through a terrifying ordeal, and they should have a chance to tell the parole board what his release would mean to them.”

A shotgun lying on the street in the foreground heightens the dramatic tension of the scene as Ptl. Stephen Gilroy lies dead on the curb. At the right, near the open cruiser door, Ptl. Brian Tuohy gives medical aid to Ptl. Frank Carpentier, fashioning a tourniquet from the wounded officer’s belt and applying it to his leg. The officer taking cover behind the lamppost is unidentified.

Patrolman Stephen Gilroy, in his high school football uniform, in his NYPD blues, and in a relaxed and social moment.
Photos courtesy of Patricia Gilroy

Said Patricia Gilroy, who has never remarried: “It’s been more than 35 years since that day and he is still the love of my life. I still miss him.”

The PBA’s efforts, news accounts of the controversy and editorials expressing outrage produced results. The Parole Board put Raheem’s release on hold pending victims’ impact statements, which were scheduled for Dec. 21. The PBA reached out for other cops who had risked their lives outside that sporting goods store at that long-ago crime scene, the ones who survived, and the PBA reached out for hostages, too.

At the December hearing, Patrolman Frank Carpentier described how he had been shot in the leg and then received death threats from unnamed Black Muslims while he was in thewounds. Other retired officers also testified — Patrolman Brian Tuohy, for example. And from their testimony we learned that they too had performed heroic deeds on that day but hadn’t talked about them then because they considered the dead cop the only hero.

The sporting goods store’s owner, Jerry Riccio, now 71, testified about how Raheem gave instructions to shoot at Gilroy’s head.

Patricia Gilroy, married for just three years when her husband was taken from her, said: “Steve was on the sergeants’ list, and as soon as that promotion came through, we were going to look for a house and hopefully be blessed with children... Wasn’t it enough that one officer was killed or that two officers were wounded? What about the terror the 12 hostages lived in for those 47 hours, [to] not know if they’d be killed at any moment.”

And Stephen Kenna, Gilroy’s nephew and one of several relatives who testified, said: “I actually saw a piece of my mother’s soul deteriorate before my eyes as police officers came to our door and told her, ‘Your brother Stephen was killed in the line of duty.’ The screams, and my father catching her before she fell to the ground, will haunt me until the day I die.”

“I saw a piece of my mother’s soul deteriorate before my eyes as police officers told her, ‘Your brother Stephen was killed.’ ”

As a result of the victims’ impact statements, another meeting of the board was scheduled for Feb. 8, and at that session at least one board member changed his or her vote, and Raheem’s release was vetoed for now. “Sadly, it took the painful recollections of many of [Raheem’s] victims who had to relive that tragic event to remind the parole board that this cop-killer would say anything in order to achieve parole,” Pat Lynch told the Daily News.

A rescission hearing is expected to be held later this spring, at which Raheem’s lawyer will probably try to rebut the victims’ impact statements. We believe his efforts will fail because those statements are all true. At any rate, the PBA will do everything in its power to continue this so-far-successful effort to keep this cop-killer behind bars for the rest of his life.

We’ll keep you posted.