The family of Randolph Holder, the Guyana-born New York City police officer who was shot dead on duty on Tuesday said he died pursuing his passion and they are proud of him.
Holder, 33, and his partners responded to reports of gunshots around 8.30 pm in East Harlem and encountered a man riding a bicycle. A chase began and subsequently gunshots were exchanged between the police and the assailant and Holder was hit in the head. He was rushed to the Harlem Hospital Center where he was pronounced dead.
“First and foremost we are proud of him. We are utterly proud of him,” Holder’s grandmother, Elizabeth Lovell, told Stabroek News in Georgetown yesterday. “He was a peaceful person, always quiet. His mother died when he was small and his father lived in the States so I used to take care of him. After his mom died his father sent for him and he left and was living Queens ever since,” she added. She said that Holder spent eight years abroad before he graced his homeland again.
“It was his passion. He came from a line of policemen and so it was just in him to serve the law and try to make wherever he was going a better place.
“I remember when he first got there and he told me that the requirements to be a police officer was a lot and he worked hard towards it. He did all of the exams and everything he had to do to be qualified for it because that’s what he wanted.
He never gave up pursuing his dreams and he died doing it,” she said.
“I would always call him at the internet or sometimes he would call… He would always call. I remember speaking to him last week and I told him I would call him back this week, but well…,” she said. “He was always looking forward to the future and he never forgot about us here,” she added.
Meanwhile, the New York Times (NYT) said that the man suspected of fatally shooting Holder had been on the run from the police for weeks. He had been accused of dropping out of a court-mandated drug treatment programme and playing a role in a shooting last month.
“The perpetrator in-volved here was obviously a hardened, violent criminal who should not have been allowed on the streets,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said yesterday afternoon, according to the NYT. De Blasio called for a broad reform of the criminal justice system, saying there needed to be a better way to ensure that violent criminals who pose a danger to the public are not on the streets.
“We can get those people off the streets and keep them in prison or some other institutional setting,” he said.
Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, speaking alongside the mayor at a news conference, praised Holder, for his courage in running toward danger, and said “four cops killed in less than a year is too many.”
“That’s a prime example of what we’re talking about — people that engage constantly in violence but we seem to have the hardest time trying to keep them in jail or prison,” Bratton said, according to the NYT.
Last fall, the man suspected in the shooting, Tyrone Howard, was arrested along with 18 other members of a drug crew that had spread violence through a stretch of public housing along the East River and was ordered into a drug diversion programme. This programme, the NYT said, is meant to keep some drug offenders from further crowding jails.
In May, he stopped taking part in the programme, the officials said.
“If ever there’s a candidate not to be diverted it would be this guy,” Bratton said. “He’s a poster boy for not being diverted.”
“He clearly knew that they were on his trail. They’ve made numerous attempts to grab him,” Stephen P. Davis, the department’s deputy commissioner for public information, said yesterday. “He’s considered a very major drug dealer in the East River Houses.”
On Tuesday, the NYT said that the first shots were fired around 8:30 p.m., echoing through the brick and concrete yards of the East Harlem housing projects.
According to law enforcement officials, two crews got into a dispute in front of a parking garage at 445 East 102nd Street between First Avenue and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, and the situation quickly escalated.
The NYT report said that there was evidence that the crews fired away at each other from across the street. Calls went into 911 and Officer Holder and his partner, Officer Omar Wallace, were among a number of police officers to converge on the scene.
