Don’t call me a hero
Published: March 16, 2006
In a flash of steel the ex-con raised his .44-caliber magnum revolver, ready to unleash more rounds at the pair of cops he had just wounded in a Brooklyn flophouse.
Instinctively, Sgt. Chiksum Gong grabbed the cylinder of the weapon, gripping it tightly to prevent another bullet from rotating into the chamber. As long as he held on, the gun was useless in the hands of the crazed would-be cop killer.
And now - despite Gong’s humble protestations - he’s a hero.
“It was instinct, not a single thought went through my head,” Gong, 45, told the Daily News yesterday in his first comments since Monday morning’s shooting in Brownsville.
“At the academy and on the job, you keep hearing, ‘Grab the gun, grab the gun,’” he said.
“I guess if you hear it so many times, you just do it,” Gong added, noting that the harrowing encounter was the first shooting he had witnessed in nearly 19 years on the job.
Gong and three other cops had raced to a boardinghouse after suspect Jonathan Julian allegedly set fire to its kitchen and menaced other tenants with a nasty butcher knife.
But when the officers burst into Julian’s 6-foot-by-8-foot third-floor room, they found the former felon - who had previously been arrested for attacking cops - armed with a gun, Gong said.
When the “Dirty Harry”-style gun erupted twice with deafening roars, Gong’s training kicked in.
“Someone yelled, ‘Gun,’ and I just grabbed for it,” Gong said yesterday as he walked Sarge, his Labrador retriever, outside his Brooklyn home. “I held on as tight as I could.”
As Gong gripped the cylinder, Officer Nicholas Horun clutched Julian’s gun hand in the heart-stopping moments before the officers were able to subdue their crazed attacker.
“I wasn’t being brave, I was just reacting,” Gong said. “[My concern] was that everyone was going to be okay, and I’m relieved they are.”
Two officers - Hector Ramirez and John Antonacci - were hit by Julian’s wild shots, but both cops’ bulletproof vests warded off serious injuries.
The four cops were hailed as heroes by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly in the hours after the shooting. But Gong quietly deflected the praise yesterday.
“Sure, there’s a sense of accomplishment and I know people are calling me a hero,” he said, “but I really feel like I was just doing my job like anyone else would’ve.”
Gong, who has a 9-year-old daughter, also conceded yesterday that his wife was unsettled by his brush with death and had been encouraging him to “keep his head down” so close to retirement.
“I do think I’ll leave when I get my 20 [years on the force],” he said. “But this is something I’ll remember.”
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