Mayor Bloomberg yesterday sent the state Parole Board a letter urging that Police Officer Edward Byrne’s killers be kept behind bars “both now and in the future.” To set them free, he wrote, would be “appalling” to all New Yorkers.
Byrne turned 22 five days before he was gunned down on Feb. 26, 1988, while guarding the South Jamaica, Queens, house of a witness set to testify against drug dealers.
This marks only the third time that Bloomberg has written the board. Both other letters asked that two Black Liberation Army members convicted of killing Police Officers Joseph Piagentini, 28, and Waverly Jones, 34, in 1971, be kept behind bars.