Man shot dead by cops after threatening mom with screwdriver
Police shot and killed a man who refused to drop a screwdriver he was using to threaten his mother Saturday morning in Queens, officials said.
Two officers responded to a chaotic scene at around 3:30 a.m. at Westgate and Thurston streets in Springfield Gardens, where a frantic woman, who was being held by a man in the stairwell, screamed: “He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!” Chief of Patrol Terence A. Monahan said at a morning press conference.
The cops ordered the man, identified by police sources as Jahlire Nicholson, to drop the tool, but he refused, Monahan said.
The officers then tried to disarm Nicholson, 28, and during the scuffle, shot at him with a Taser, missed, but managed to free the mom, who police sources identified as Jarzette Jacobs, 55.
But Nicholson still would not heed commands to drop the screwdriver, and approached the cops with the tool in his hand, Monahan said.
“It’s a dangerous weapon. A screwdriver you can be stabbed with, the same way you can be stabbed with a knife,” Monahan said.
With that in mind, Monahan said, the officers each squeezed off one shot, hitting Nicholson in the shoulder and leg. He died of his injuries at Jamaica Hospital, officials said.
Nicholson has 10 prior arrests, including an assault from 2007 and criminal possession of a weapon, police said. And there have also been multiple domestic incident reports in connection to Nicholson filed in 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2006, police said. It was not immediately known if the incidents occurred at the Springfield Gardens address. Nicholson also has an address in Deer Park, L.I., public records show.
The two cops, who were not immediately named, were treated at Long Island Jewish Hospital for ringing in their ears, police said.
Neighbors were unsettled by the early morning violence.
“My wife saw the police lights..I was kind of shocked because in the few months that I’ve been here we’ve not seen cops. It’s a quiet neighborhood,” said Tariq Ivan, 34.
Saturday’s incident marks the city’s fourth police-involved shooting this year.
On Jan. 5, cops shot and wounded 24-year-old Patrick Allen, a scion of a wealthy New York family, when he and a pal took a cache of guns and drugs into a wooded area in Charleston, Staten Island and started popping off shots.
A day earlier, cops fatally shot 18-year-old Joshua Martino, who fired a gun into the B-Hive Lounge in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. And about six hours before that, an NYPD cop fatally shot 63-year-old James Owens, who was armed with a 13-inch knife in a Canarsie home.