Hours after Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot a former girlfriend in Maryland on Saturday, he returned to New York, his place of birth, armed with a gun and harbouring intentions to attack police officers, officials said. He would do so by the afternoon, they said, killing two New York City police officers in an ambush shooting in Brooklyn and then killing himself.
By the end of the day, detectives were combing through the life of Brinsley, a 28-year-old man with ties to East Flatbush whose last known address appeared to be in Atlanta, said police commissioner William J Bratton. His recent arrest history, mostly in Ohio and Georgia, depicted a man familiar with the criminal use of firearms – but without any apparent acts of serious violence that would have anticipated the sort of premeditated killing of police officers that Commissioner Bratton called an “assassination” and that New York mayor Bill de Blasio said had been done “execution-style”.
Brinsley was arrested on robbery charges in Ohio in 2009 and weapons possession in Georgia, court records showed. Investigators in New York believe he had been in the city as recently as 2011 when he was a suspect in a harassment case. Later that year, he was convicted of felony gun possession in Georgia, and sentenced to two years in prison. It was not immediately clear when he was released from custody. Reached by phone at her Georgia home, a woman who identified herself as Brinsley’s sister said she had not seen him in two years. She said she did not remember hearing her brother express anger at police officers. “I need to call my mom,” she said before hanging up.
It was not immediately clear what brought Brinsley to Baltimore. But he was there on Saturday at around 5.45 am, when the authorities said he shot the former girlfriend (29) in the stomach, wounding her. Soon after, messages began appearing on the woman’s Instagram account, believed to have been posted by Brinsley, that carried some “very antipolice” messages, Bratton said. Based on the postings, Baltimore County authorities determined one of them had come from Brooklyn. They said they placed a call to the 70th police precinct in New York City around 2.10pm.
By 2.45pm, law enforcement officials in Baltimore County had warned their counterparts in New York and elsewhere to be on the lookout, sending around a digital warning poster with Brinsley’s face and history. Around that time, the police said, Brinsley walked up to a marked squad car on a Brooklyn street with a silver semiautomatic handgun and opened fire at the two New York City police officers inside, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.
Brinsley shot himself a short time later on the platform of a subway station. As Brinsley appeared to have posted antipolice messages to the web before the killings, Mr de Blasio implored New Yorkers to tell the authorities if they see similar postings warning of coming violence. Yet even as Brinsley “indicated” on the account that he was going to attack police, Commissioner Bratton said the motive for the shooting remained unclear. Investigators were looking into whether Brinsley had considered killing police officers before the shooting in Maryland, or if it had been a deadly outgrowth of that burst of violence.
Part of the investigation, the commissioner said, would be focused on his recent activities, including whether he had taken part in any of the protests after the deaths of two unarmed black men in confrontations with the police.
With Brinsley taking his own life, Commissioner Bratton said, investigators were now working to piece together his movements and motivations with an eye toward restoring "some sanity to the madness that occurred here this afternoon in the streets of Brooklyn." – (New York Times)