At 2:47 p.m. Saturday, New York Police Department officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were very much alive. They were seated in their cruiser in Brooklyn. It was parked curbside.
No one knows what they were talking about or thinking about. They expected to return to their loved ones after work, though. Liu, 32, was a newlywed; Ramos, 40, was married and had two sons.
Neither officer would live to see 2:48. Police Commissioner William Bratton — on national TV Saturday — said Liu and Ramos “may never have actually even seen their assailant — their murderer.”
That’s because Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the assailant and murderer, ambushed them. He did so after announcing his intent on Instagram and apparently even publishing a photo of the gun he intended to use. This he did after shooting his ex-girlfriend in Maryland earlier in the day.
Any two cops would do.
Brinsley, 28, “walked up to the police car,” Bratton told the New York public and the American people. “He took a shooting stance on the passenger side and fired the weapon — his weapon — several times through the front passenger window, striking both officers.”
“They were, quite simply, assassinated — targeted for their uniform, and for the responsibility they embraced to keep the people of this city safe,” Bratton said.
By yesterday it had become clear that using Instagram to announce his plan to execute two police officers — or, as he put it, “Putting Wings On Pigs” — would not be enough. Seconds before he ambushed Liu and Ramos he reportedly told passerby, “Watch what I’m going to do.”
After shooting a human being in Maryland and killing two others in New York, Brinsley then took another human life: his own.