Radio Free Montone: The Bullets That Tore A Hole In The Heart Of NYC
By John Montone, 1010 WINS
The bullets that killed officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu tore a hole in the heart of this city's holiday season.
I wrote those words and spoke them on 1010 WINS two days after the assassin ambushed the police officers on a Bed-Stuy street. And they kept coming back to me as I tried to enjoy some time off with family and friends.
One week after officer Ramos took his last breath I walked the Highline with my family on a spring-like afternoon. The crowd was thick and festive. Tourists snapped selfies and filled beer bars in the Meat Packing District. But the occasional TV screen showed the somber ceremony in Queens. Rafael Ramos's widow and two teenage sons listening as Vice-President Biden read an inscription from a tombstone in Ireland, "Death leaves a heartache no one can heal. Love leaves a memory no one can steal."
Eight days later, four days after the great ball dropped in Times Square bringing in 2015 and an hour or so before the kick-off of an NFL playoff game, there was Officer Wenjian Liu's tiny widow breaking our hearts when she called her husband, "My hero," and left the service clutching his photo as if it was her husband in the flesh.
Such sorrow.
At both services police officers turned their backs to Mayor de Blasio even though Police Commissioner Bratton asked them before Liu's service not to. "A hero's funeral is about grieving, not grievances," he said. The Mayor spoke from the heart about both men, but the damage had been done. De Blasio lashed out at a reporter who asked him about protestors who chanted they wanted cops dead and attacked two lieutenants. The Mayor made the media complicit in causing the city's psychic wounds.
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I had a similar experience when Brooklyn Boro President Adams stopped by the sidewalk memorial to Ramos and Liu. I asked Adams if the shameful chants of the protestors had created an atmosphere in which a deranged and hateful man might seize an opportunity to make a name for himself. Adams quickly denied this was the case.
I believe he and the Mayor are wrong. The Mayor errs when he says the media are focusing in on the few while the vast majority of the demonstrations have been orderly. Shutting down major roads, bridges and tunnels is nothing of the sort and comparing the NYPD to the KKK is despicable. As for Adams, I would ask him to read a bit about Dallas in the early 1960s.
The hatred for President Kennedy and what many people thought he stood for boiled over into the pages of the local press. And while I'm convinced Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, that unhinged, delusional young man was surely infected by the viral rancor of that place and time. And so I believe it was with the cop killer.
We have turned the page on another year, but this tragic tale travels with us.
