With bare hands, hero grabbed gun to save fellow cops
Published: March 16, 2006
Seconds after two of his brothers in blue were shot by a madman, a brave Brooklyn cop grabbed the cylinder of a .44-caliber Magnum with his bare hand yesterday to keep more bullets from flying, police said.
Sgt. Chiksum Gong went face to face with cop-hater Jonathan Julian - wresting away the “Dirty Harry”-style weapon as his two colleagues were staggered by slugs stopped by bulletproof vests, officials said.
“He’s a hero - I asked him not to be a hero,” Gong’s wife, Shawna, told the Daily News hours after the dramatic close-range confrontation in a Bushwick boardinghouse.
She added she wanted her husband, a 19-year NYPD veteran, to lie low in his last 15 months before retirement.
But fellow cops said Gong, 45, and the three other officers who grappled with the crazed gunman in a cramped room weren’t the kind to sit back.
Gong and Officers Hector Ramirez, 33, John Antonacci, 40, and Nicholas Horun, 27, arrived at the Halsey St. boardinghouse just before 3 a.m.
Tenants told the cops Julian, 29, threatened them with a butcher knife after declaring he had set a fire in the communal kitchen with the deranged goal of “burning the Devil.”
The cops rushed into Julian’s 6-foot-by-8-foot third-floor room thinking they were there to disarm a firebug with a knife.
Instead, they found Julian babbling about “the Devil” - and brandishing a .44-caliber gun.
The cops charged through the door, all tumbling with Julian to a mattress on the floor.
As Antonacci and Ramirez grabbed for the gun, Julian - who has a history of attacking cops - opened fire, police said.
Antonacci, a 16-year NYPD veteran, was hit in the back but his vest deflected the bullet.
Another shot tore through Ramirez’s shirt just above his heart. It pierced his vest and left a bullet-sized bruise on his chest - and blood on his badge.
“He said it happened so fast he didn’t realize he was hit until he got outside,” said Ramirez’s wife, Diane, 33, who is seven months pregnant with their second child. “I just thank God,” she added. “Attaining this job was a life-long dream. He loves what he does.”
With their colleagues shot, Horun and Gong redoubled efforts to stop the madness.
Horun, a five-year NYPD veteran, grabbed Julian’s gun hand as Gong reached for the cylinder, police said. Julian chomped on Horun’s pinkie, cops said.
“He told me not to worry,” said Horun’s mother, Toni Horun. “What can you do? It’s part of his job. But mothers worry about everything. I worried when he was in kindergarten.”
Despite the injury, Horun held on long enough for Gong to grab the cylinder and pull away the weapon.
The NYPD teaches officers if they have to snatch a revolver, to grab the cylinder, which can prevent a shooter from squeezing the trigger.
“The actions of Sgt. Gong and Officer Horun in disarming the suspect almost certainly saved others,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. “It’s remarkable that none of the officers was killed or more seriously wounded.”
Antonacci and Ramirez were in stable condition at Kings County Hospital last night.
“Our prayers in this case were answered,” said Mayor Bloomberg, who renewed his call for tougher gun laws.
Julian was charged last night with four counts of first-degree attempted murder.
Neighbors said the man they called “Dred” long had acted bizarrely - calling himself “God.”
Julian told detectives he felt he had to fire on the officers to “get rid of the Devil,” a police source said. An unloaded .25-caliber gun and extra rounds were found in his room, police said.
“The Devil had something to do with it, yes you could say that,” Julian told reporters as he was led out of the 81st Precinct stationhouse in handcuffs. “Yes, I did it. For so many reasons.”
Ramirez, a four-year NYPD veteran, last faced a loaded gun on Christmas Eve, when an armed parolee pointed a .357-magnum at him and another officer on a Brooklyn street.
Ramirez and the other officer both fired, and hit the gunman once in the butt.
“He said he’s not scared. I was never happy with it, but this is his profession,” said Ramirez’s mother, Frances Ramirez, 67. “This is what he wants to do.”
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