The devastated fiancée of the suicidal cop who blew his brains out on the job last week revealed to The Post yesterday how she had desperately tried to talk him out of it in a phone call only seconds before he pulled the trigger.
“We weren’t fighting,” insisted Maria Stuart, 28, who was planning to marry NYPD Officer Terrence Dean, 28, on Aug. 18. “All I was trying to do was tell Terrence he needs help.”
Stuart said she had admitted to Dean during the frantic Thursday-night call that she had just phoned his Queens precinct house and made vague warnings about a suicidal officer.
“Fine, I’m going to kill myself,” Dean replied and hung up, she said.
The cop then pointed his service gun at his head and fired while at the Queens scene of a car burglary — in front of his partner and the car’s owner.
Stuart spoke to The Post after Suffolk cops forced her to leave Dean’s home in Medford, where she had lived with him, after his parents objected to her being there.
Stuart said Dean had been deeply depressed at least partly because he had felt pressured by people around him to become a cop when he really wanted to be a firefighter.
His family declined repeated requests for comment.
Alarmed by Dean’s increasingly erratic behavior in days before his suicide — and fearing for her and her 5-year-old daughter’s lives — Stuart had fled the house with the girl after he refused to seek professional help, she said.
Dean, she said, had put his gun in his mouth and threatened to kill himself Wednesday morning, the day before his suicide.
Later, he went to the driveway and shot out the windows of his car after an argument over her leaving her engagement ring at work, she said.
Stuart said Dean’s father came over later Wednesday and he and Terrence went into the garage, where the officer again put the gun in his mouth.
She and the dad screamed at him not to shoot, and he left with his father, she said.
Stuart said she pulled up to the home at about noon yesterday only to be confronted by a friend of Dean’s family, who called Dean’s father, Avery Dean, to the house.
The father called Suffolk cops.
Stuart said she produced a driver’s license and mail indicating she lived there.
But “we don’t know who lived here. This will have to be done through the courts,” Suffolk Police Sgt. Tom O’Shea said.