These brothers don’t run from trouble.
The older brother of the NYPD cop who arrested a neighborhood punk yesterday despite two gunshot wounds took a bullet himself in 2006 while nabbing two bank robbers who tried to carjack him in Queens.
And like Nelson Vergara, his brother, Officer John Lopez, 40, was off duty when duty called.
“It really is quite an unusual coincidence. The odds are incredible. Two brothers, both police officers, getting shot and still making the arrest? This is one in a million, I think,” Lopez said yesterday after visiting Vergara at St. Barnabas Hospital in The Bronx.
Lopez said his training kicked in on Dec. 30, 2006, when the armed thugs tried to take his car — with his wife, infant son and mother-in-law inside — after they knocked off a bank on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst.
Lopez was shot in the leg — a wound that nearly severed an artery — but still chased the robbers, shooting one in the stomach and the groin. Both were arrested.
“We’re trained to help people. That’s what we try our best to do. We took an oath, you know. After that, whatever happens, happens. But we have to defend ourselves and our families, too,” Lopez said at his family’s home in Queens.
“He is a survivor, and so am I. I guess it’s in the blood. It has to be. It runs in the family,” he said of his 36-year-old brother.