Memorial corner

Down the street from my apartment is this memorial notice for a. young auxiliary policeman (meaning an unarmed volunteer) who was shot in 2007 by a crazed gunman. For reasons unknown, the shooter had just murdered an employee in a pizza store, after which Eugene and his fellow auxiliary (the diagonal corner is dedicated to him) chased the guy down the block. When he came raging back, they hid under a parked car; he shot them both in cold blood. 

I remember it well because it was one of the few shootings to take place in my neighborhood since I moved there in 2005 — and also because Eugene shared a politics class with my son at NYU. We never got the whole story because the shooter was himself killed soon after by the other (armed) cops.

In the immediate aftermath, my building’s residents all huddled together in the corner bar, waiting to be allowed back into our apartments and trying to gather news of what had happened. One of my neighbors commented that this would never have occurred in earlier decades, when the Mafia ran the neighborhood and it was completely safe.