Heroic Upper West Side cops saved an armed, suicidal teen who tried to dive out of a 10th-floor window in Manhattan on Feb. 18.
A dramatic body-cam video captured the fast moving encounter.
The rescue by four officers from the 24th Precinct brought special praise from NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea who called them selfless and heroic.
Last week, officers from the @NYPD24Pct responded to a call of a man who wanted to harm himself. When they arrived, he was holding a knife and then attempted to jump out of the 10th floor window. Miraculously, the officers were able to grab his ankles, and pulled him to safety. pic.twitter.com/Peo4hv3lyx
— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) February 25, 2020
The 19-year-old’s mother called 911 on Feb. 18 just after 9 p.m., fearing her son might injure himself, but when the four officers arrived at the apartment on W. 68th Street, no one initially answered.
“I knocked on the door. We could hear the distress inside, but we couldn’t get an answer,” said Police Officer Nelson Gomez as he stood with his three colleagues.
Gomez said one of his fellow cops checked the door and realized it was open.
Gomez and the other three officers —Ibrahim Morrsi, Eugene Choi, and William Bodner — rushed into the apartment, where they found a dangerous domestic dispute in one of the bedrooms — the mother screaming at her son, who was waving a knife and was hysterical.
“Then he dives headfirst out the window,” Gomez said, and Officer Choi grabs him by his left ankle.
As Choi is holding the teen by his ankle, Bodner and Morrsi rush over to keep the 19-year-old from falling, according to Gomez and the video.
Gomez ordered the teen to drop the knife – he tossed it out the window and then officers finally pulled him to safety, the video revealed.
“It took seconds. Our adrenaline was pumping. Honestly, it was just a relief to save another person’s life,” Gomez said.
The teen was taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation, but was not physically injured. His name was kept confidential by police as he was not charged with a crime, officials said.
”These are unsung stories of the people who day in day out are here to help people,” Shea said. “I want to just tell them personally and in person that they did a tremendous job. We should do this more often.”
