Dozens of cops cheered an NYPD officer as he left the hospital Sunday following treatment for head and hand injuries he suffered in a confrontation that left a Brooklyn man fatally shot.
The slain man’s relatives, meanwhile, criticized the cop and demanded answers.
Officer Andris Bisogno smiled and waved as he left Jamaica Hospital about 4p.m.
Bisogno needed surgical staples to close a 2-inch gash on his head and had his left hand bandaged.
He suffered the wounds Saturday after he and partner Jennifer Garcia grappled with Erickson Gomez Brito, 21, in the Van Dyke Houses on Sutter Ave. near Mother Gaston Blvd. in Brownsville at 1:10 p.m., police said.Cops, responding to a report of a suspicious man, approached Brito and asked for his ID. The moment turned violent and Bisogno pulled out his baton — which cops say Brito grabbed and used to beat both officers.
The cops pulled their guns and fired up to nine shots.
Both officers were taken to Jamaica Hospital. A bruised and battered Garcia was released Saturday.
Brito’s family questioned the NYPD’s narrative. “We don’t believe what the cops said at all,” said his sister Omahis Brito, 19. “It was two against one. Why couldn’t they have done something else? Why did they have to shoot him seven times?”
Brito described her big brother as a homebody who loved his mother’s Dominican cooking and bachata music.
“Our comfort was that he was here,” she said. “He’s not going to be here now.”
Clutching a photo of her son, 52-year-old Victoria Brito criticized Garcia and Bisogno’s response.
“They were cowards,” she said in a voice hoarse from crying through a sleepless night. “I want to find out what really happened.
“He was not an aggressive person. He was calm. He never got into problems with nobody,” she said.
Brito’s father, Osiris Brito, 53, so devastated he was scarcely able to string together sentences, kept repeating the words “seven shots.”
“There should have been a different way to handle this,” he said. “He had a family. He wasn’t some dog in the streets that they can just shoot and get away with it.”
