A former New York City police officer who resigned last year after being arrested on corruption charges is suspected of fatally shooting his 28-year-old ex-girlfriend and wounding another woman in Brooklyn on Sunday, the police said.
The police said the shooting happened shortly after 4:30 p.m. inside Apartment 1B of a condominium building at 84 Engert Avenue in Greenpoint.
The ex-girlfriend, identified by a family friend as Catherine D’Onofrio, was shot once in the head and taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where she was pronounced dead.
The second woman, also 28, who lives in the apartment, suffered graze wounds to the head and arm and was listed in stable condition at Bellevue, the police said.
The police said the women were friends, possibly co-workers at a law firm.
The suspect, Jerry Bowens, 43, was identified by the surviving victim, the police said. Mr. Bowens was not in police custody as of late Sunday night, said Carlos Nieves, a police spokesman.
The police described Mr. Bowens as a former undercover narcotics unit officer who resigned last year after being arrested on corruption charges.
Mr. Bowens and another officer were accused in court papers of taking drugs and cash they had recovered and using the drugs to pay a confidential informant.
Four narcotics officers and a deputy police chief were arrested in the scandal. After the arrests, the Brooklyn district attorney dismissed the charges or vacated convictions in 183 cases that involved the accused officers. The investigation is continuing.
An attempt to reach a lawyer who represented Mr. Bowens in the corruption case was unsuccessful.
Annie Turchiano, who identified herself on Sunday as Ms. D’Onofrio’s godmother, said the woman worked as a legal secretary for a law firm in Manhattan and took care of her parents, both legally blind, at their home on 70th Street in Bensonhurst.
“The parents will never be the same,” Ms. Turchiano said.
Ms. Turchiano said that she met Mr. Bowens about two weeks ago at a dinner celebrating her goddaughter’s birthday. He was introduced by Ms. D’Onofrio as her “friend,” Ms. Turchiano said, adding that she believed the young woman was dating another man.
Later, Ms. Turchiano stood outside her goddaughter’s home, smoking a cigarette, lamenting that the world had lost something more than a young woman’s life.
The last time she saw Ms. D’Onofrio, she said she told her goddaughter that she was going to change the world, “one by one.”
“She would take in a cockroach if it needed her,” she said.
Neighbors gathered on Sunday night in the vestibule of the condominium building where the shooting occurred, discussing how such violence could seep into their complex, nine stories of glass and aluminum enclosing million-dollar penthouses and $700,000 apartments.
Shortly before 11:30 p.m. Sunday, Ms. D’Onofrio’s father, John D’Onofrio, walked his daughter’s dog, a white mutt, up and down her street. He walked quickly, manically, up and down the block.
At one point he turned and said, “There’s nothing to say and nothing to be done.”
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5877601.ece
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