An Army reservist with a clean record was fatally shot in his car by an NYPD detective early Thursday — before he even had “a chance to put his hands up” in surrender, a witness told the Daily News.
Noel Polanco, 22, was killed on the Grand Central Parkway in what witness Diane DeFerrari called an act of “pure road rage” following a terrifying chase by cops in an unmarked vehicle.
“Noel didn't have a chance to put his hands up. They screamed, ‘Put up your hands!’ and shot at the same time,” said DeFerrari, a 36-year-old bartender who was riding in the front passenger seat. “It was simultaneous. There was a pop and Noel gasped.”
“They acted in pure road rage,” she added.
Following the shooting, DeFerrari said she and a backseat passenger, an off-duty NYPD cop, were ordered out and made to put their hands on the car.
“The cop said, ‘Your friend just shot himself,’” DeFerrari recalled. “I didn’t dispute what I saw because I was afraid. They wouldn’t let me look at him.”
The cop who gunned down Polanco offered a different account, according to a source familiar with what he told colleagues. Detective Hassam Hamdy said he pulled the trigger after the Queens man reached down for something that turned out to be a yellow-and-black power drill, the source said.
But DeFerrari insisted Polanco never took his hands off the wheel.
“His hands were on the steering wheel” the whole time, said DeFarrari — a bartender at the Ice Lounge in Astoria, where Polanco worked in the club’s hookah section.
Polanco may have been driving under the influence - he had been served alcohol before he got in the car to drive his friends home.
Nonetheless, nothing in the accounts that have surfaced so far suggest he should have been killed by the NYPD.
And yet he was.
Another unarmed person shot and killed by the NYPD.
When will Mayor Bloomberg's personal army be reined in?
When will Bloomberg and Ray Kelly be held to account for these murders?
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