“I hurt my girlfriend.”
Hours after he allegedly shot dead his girlfriend, a “psycho” ex-cop embroiled in a drug scandal called The Post and made the stunning confession to a Post reporter.
“I’m the cop wanted for the shooting,” Jerry Bowens, 43, told the reporter early yesterday.
“I’m crazy. I want to kill myself, but the family wants me to turn myself in,” he said, before adding, “I hurt my girlfriend.”
COP EYED IN GAL PAL’S SLAY GETS PSYCH EVALUATION
It was a bizarre twist to a tale of jealousy and blood lust that came to a head at 4:40 p.m. Sunday.
Law-enforcement sources said Bowens was seething because his “on-again, off-again” girlfriend of two years, Catherine Donofrio, 28, was seeing other men.
Bowens and Donofrio were visiting her friend, Melissa Simmons, also 28, who lives in Greenpoint, when the dirty ex-cop suddenly snapped.
He began ranting that Simmons was fixing up Donofrio with other men, the sources said.
Suddenly, he flashed a gun. Donofrio screamed and Bowens allegedly shot her in the right temple.
Then, the crazed man ordered Simmons to lie down and pointed the gun directly at her head, the sources said.
But just as he pulled the trigger, she quickly moved – an instinct that saved her life, they said.
She escaped with just a graze wound on her head.
He first called The Post at about 12:45 a.m. and said he was going to surrender at a “precinct by the water.”
Since the first of several of his calls came from Staten Island, where he had once lived, the reporter asked if he meant the 120th Precinct, which is near the ferry terminal.
He said he did and The Post alerted cops that he would show up there and he said he had a gun with him. Emergency-service officers were waiting and the takedown went off peacefully.
Cops found a .357 magnum with four spent shells and a 7.62mm automatic rifle in his car.
Bowens, who pleaded guilty to drug dealing and resigned last month and had been set to testify against a sergeant snared in the drug scandal, was taken to Kings County Hospital for treatment of a wound on his left biceps and for a psych evaluation.
“He’s gone nuts,” said a source. “He’s lost his mind. He’s psycho.”
Donofrio, who wanted to become a lawyer, was a loving daughter who cared for her parents. They lived in the same Bensonhurst apartment building.
A friend said of Bowens, “She was trying to get rid of him for a long time. They had broken up. But she felt sorry for him so she let him stay in her apartment.”
Last June, Bowens was busted on charges of stealing crack from drug suspects to give to informants. Four other cops were also implicated.
Additional reporting by Jamie Schram, John Doyle, Tim Perone and Andy Geller