How a Calm Call for Help Led 2 N.Y.P.D. Officers Into a Hail of Gunfire

The latest deadly episode to rattle the city began with a routine domestic disturbance call and ended with one officer dead and another in critical condition.

The call came just a couple of hours into the police night tour on Friday, practically routine on a given evening in New York City. A mother said she was arguing with her son, who had verbally threatened her, and wanted officers to come to talk to him in their apartment in Harlem. Three officers — one who started last year, his partner with four years’ experience on the job and a rookie riding along to observe — pulled up outside the block of squat buildings and entered.

They were met by the mother and a second son, according to the account the police shared on Friday, bolstered on Saturday by a police official briefed on the investigation. He’s in the back bedroom, the mother told the officers, and called for him to come out. When there was no response, the two officers made their way down a cramped hallway toward the open door, one behind the other, the lead officer calling the son’s name. The trainee stayed back to collect information from the family.

Then the son appeared in the bedroom doorway, releasing a deadly hail of gunfire that shattered the calm and rocked a city already on edge from a monthslong crest of lethal and senseless violence. The 47-year-old son, criminally noteworthy only for a 19-year-old drug conviction and older arrests out of state, raised a black handgun with a bizarre Tommy-gun-style attachment and opened fire, killing Officer Jason Rivera, 22, and gravely injuring his partner, Wilbert Mora, 27.