Judge who freed ‘cop-killer’ apologizes: ‘I am truly sorry’
Now she’s sorry — five months after freeing the career drug dealer who is charged with murdering Police Officer Randolph Holder.
The hero cop’s death this week, by a bullet to the forehead during a shootout in East Harlem, “breaks my heart,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Patricia Nuñez said Friday.
“I know. I am truly sorry,” Nuñez said sadly when a Post reporter reminded her about the 33-year-old cop’s devastated family.
“And I will speak on the record” at sentencing, she added, referring to suspect Tyrone Howard’s Nov. 12 court date in a 2014 drug-sale case — the very one she had “resolved” in May by sending the gangbanger to rehab instead of jail, despite his history of three similar felony sale convictions and the advice of prosecutors.
Nuñez then paused as she sat in her car outside her parking garage in The Bronx.
“There is nothing,” she said, her voice strained, “that breaks my heart more than a police officer dying.”
The judge closed her eyes for a second before adding, “Nothing.”
After that, she excused herself and drove off to the court complex in lower Manhattan where a grand jury was about to begin hearing testimony against Howard for first-degree murder, which is punishable by life in prison without the chance of parole.
Howard is awaiting indictment nearby in the Manhattan Detention Complex, a k a The Tombs, and will be brought back to court Tuesday to learn the grand jury’s decision.
He is among the jail’s general population but on suicide watch, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
NYPD scuba divers and Harbor Patrol cops were continuing to drag the East River for the murder weapon, a .40-caliber handgun that detectives believe Howard tossed into the water. Searchers stopped at nightfall and were to begin again in the morning.
Investigators will continue to canvass for witnesses on Saturday, sources said.
Cops have been unable to find any video surveillance footage of the murder, and the only eyewitness so far is Holder’s partner, Officer Omar Wallace, 31, whose return fire left Howard shot clean through the backside.
Wallace and Holder encountered Howard as they chased on foot a group of armed gang members fleeing a shooting on 101st Street and FDR Drive.
Holder had been a fearless in-the-trenches fighter in the NYPD’s war against guns.
In fact, his death came the night before he was to testify in Manhattan Supreme Court as the key witness against an alleged gangbanger he pulled off the street last year — again after a perilous foot chase in East Harlem, The Post has learned.
Holder would have testified at a hearing against Brandon Waters, 26, telling a judge that on East 104th Street on Halloween night 2014, he saw Waters touching his waist band and pursued him into the stairwell of a housing project, according to a law-enforcement source.
Holder caught up to Waters in a hall and allegedly saw him with a gun in his hand.
“Stop! Don’t move!” Holder shouted, drawing his service weapon.
“Stop! Don’t move!” Holder shouted, drawing his service weapon.
Waters allegedly took off and dropped the gun.
Holder was the only witness who saw Waters with the gun, according to sources.
When that hearing does go forward in early December, Holder will, in effect, make his case posthumously. Prosecutors will have to rely on the cop’s grand-jury testimony, along with statements he made to them.
“I saw the defendant pull a revolver out of his coat pocket and throw it on the ground,” Holder told the DA in a criminal complaint.
Waters served three years in prison in 2007 for gun and drug possession. Soon after his release in 2010, he was sent back to prison to serve two more years for criminal drug sales.
Meanwhile, the judge who had suggested rehab instead of prison for Howard, Justice Edward McLaughlin, has defended his and Nuñez’s decision to free the accused cop-killer.
“I don’t get a crystal ball when I get a robe,’’ McLaughlin told reporters the day after Holder’s death.
Additional reporting by Rebecca Rosenberg, Jamie Schram, Tina Moore, Georgett Robertsand Laura Italiano
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