An NYPD cop is “lucky” to be alive after he was shot in the base of the skull last night while chasing after a man wanted for murder through a Brooklyn housing project, authorities said.
“This was a miracle,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said of Officer Kevin Brennan’s survival at a late-night press conference at Bellevue Hospital.
“He’s one lucky young man.”
Mayor Bloomberg said he’d spoken to Brennan about the officer’s six-week-old daughter, Maeve.
“He understood he was hit and he said he was in a lot of pain but we joked about his daughter,” Bloomberg said.
The harrowing events began when Brennan responded, along with two other plainclothes cops, to a report of shots fired at the Bushwick Houses around 9 p.m.
When the cops pulled up, they saw three men running out of a building on Moore Street and began chasing them, Kelly said.
Luis “Baby” Ortiz, 21, who previously had been arrested by one of the responding officers, ran into the lobby of 370 Bushwick Avenue, also part of the project, and Brennan, 29, followed closely.
The other two cops, officers Michael Burbridge and Christopher Mastoros, tried to follow but the front door had locked.
Ortiz spun around and fired two shots at Brennan, who was able to squeeze off a round, cops said.
The other officers heard the shots and they rushed toward their wounded comrade, who was lying on the ground bleeding.
“I saw the cop on the floor. He was bleeding from the head,” said one resident who asked not to be identified.
“There was a lot of blood,” the man said, adding that a large contingent of cops soon arrived.
Another witness, Jasmine Minerva-Ortiz, 24, said, “There were about 30 cops and they just rushed the stretcher into the ambulance and it took off. Four cop cars followed it out.”
Brennan was rushed to the hospital where surgeons removed the entire slug from his skull, behind his right ear.
Brennan, who lives on Long Island with his wife Janet and daughter, is expected to make a full recovery.
“There’s no reason to think her daddy won’t see her crawl for the first time or dance at her wedding,” Bloomberg said.
Kelly added that Brennan was in and out of consciousness and was on morphine to lessen the considerable pain.
Brennan joined the force in 2005.
A couple of hours after the shooting, cops nabbed Ortiz at his uncle’s apartment on Bushwick Avenue, cops said.
When the horde of cops knocked on the door of the fifth-floor apartment, the man said his nephew was in the back.
They found Ortiz — who was wanted for questioning in the slaying of Andrew Brown, 45, in Bedford-Stuyvesant for the city’s first homicide this year, cops said.
He threw his black gun with a wooden handle out of the window, which was recovered by officers, police said.
Charges were pending early today.
Cops were still searching for the other two men who fled.
Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton and Jamie Schram
Cuffed: Luis “Baby” Ortiz is arrested after allegedly shooting Officer Kevin Brennan in a Brooklyn housing project. (Paul Martinka/ photographer)
Emergency Service Unit cops leave a housing project after searching for suspects in the shooting. (Paul Martinka/ photographer)