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A hero cop was shot twice from just feet away — but still managed to fire back at the ex-con gunman and save his NYPD partners’ lives by shielding them during a blazing gun battle in a Brooklyn apartment yesterday.
Detective Kenneth Ayala, 49, took bullets to his thigh and ankle — and couldn’t even walk out on his own — but fought to hang on to the group’s “bunker,’’ or shield, to protect the five officers with him, law-enforcement sources said.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for [Ayala],” Detective Michael Keenan, 52, told a parade of well-wishers at Lutheran Hospital after being struck in his left calf during the 12:30 a.m. firefight, in which four of the cops were wounded, one source said.
Keenan and Ayala were sharing a room yesterday, and Keenan would tell every visitor how Ayala “was a hero,” sources said.
But Ayala humbly waved off the praise and repeatedly insisted, “I’m not a hero.”
Another source said of Ayala, “He definitely saved their lives.
“It was a superhuman effort. He was shot twice, he held on to the bunker . . . and then he was able to empty one gun and fired a second gun.”
Keenan was wounded and laying on the ground, unable to move, so if Ayala hadn’t been able to maintain the bunker, Keenan likely would have been hit again.
The bunker is a hand-held Kevlar body shield that weighs about 15 pounds.
The cops — members of the elite Emergency Service Unit — fought the life-or-death battle after Nakwon Foxworth, 33, barricaded himself in his Sheepshead Bay apartment with his pregnant girlfriend and their 4-month-old son, said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
The woman escaped with the baby, and as the six-member police team came through the door, Foxworth — armed to the teeth — unloaded on them, cops said.
He squeezed off 12 shots, purposely aiming below the 3-foot-long bunker to hit them, sources said. Three of the cops fired back a total of 29 times, officials said.
In addition to Ayala and Keenan, Officer Matthew Granahan, 35, was hit in the left calf, and Capt. Al Pizzano, 45, suffered a graze wound to the face, injuring his nose and cheek.
Cops said Foxworth was shot once in the abdomen and was in critical but stable condition.
“The gunfight occurred in close quarters with the assailant and the officers no more than 10 feet apart,” Kelly said. “It was a good thing Foxworth was stopped.”
Inside the apartment, cops recovered the illegal 9mm Browning semiautomatic handgun that Foxworth had used against the officers. They also found a sawed-off military-style assault rifle, equipped with a scope, that had been stolen from Florida, and a defaced, .22-caliber revolver, as well as 50 rounds of ammo for the assault rifle.
The bloody drama began after Foxworth returned home with his girlfriend, Jessica Hickling, and their baby and found the service ramp to the apartment building blocked by two men delivering furniture.
The baby was in a stroller, and according to one of the movers, Foxworth was incensed that the couple’s path was obstructed by a barrel the movers were using to hold the door open.
“He took the stroller with the baby in it and started ramming it into the barrel,” said one of the movers, Kairon Decaul, 43.
“[His girlfriend] started screaming, ‘The baby! The baby!’ and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ I thought he wanted to fight.”
Decaul said the furious dad pulled out a gun and started waving it at them. When one of the movers ran to their double-parked van to call the cops, Foxworth chased him.
Then “he came back and he threw the gun into the baby’s stroller, and he put his finger in my face, threatening me. The girl was screaming, ‘Calm down!’ I said, ‘Chill out. Relax,’ ” Decaul said.
Hickling threatened to leave him over his violent behavior, but Foxworth turned to her and snarled, “You’re not going anywhere!” one source said.
The pair then fled with the baby upstairs to their sixth-floor apartment, where Foxworth began loading his cache of weapons in anticipation of a shootout, sources said.
When cops arrived, the super showed them a video surveillance tape to help them determine which apartment the couple was in.
Cops knocked on the door but didn’t get an answer. They looked through a peephole and saw Foxworth, Hickling and the child.
Then Hickling suddenly burst through the door with the baby in her arms. As the ESU unit went inside the apartment, Foxworth emerged from a bedroom and allegedly greeted them with bullets.
“When I saw cops with automatic rifles, I thought all hell was going to break loose,” said a neighbor. Paul Tardabona, 65.
Cops said Foxworth’s 9mm was part of an illegal, multiple-gun purchase in Wilmington, NC.
“We still have too many people who have no business possessing a weapon who are armed on our streets,” Mayor Bloomberg said.
“We have now had eight — that’s correct, eight — members of the department shot in the last four months. And this is the second time in the last 24 hours police have been fired upon by armed assailants.
“All the shootings have a disgraceful fact in common: All were committed with illegal guns that came from out of state.”
About nine hours earlier, ex-con Clifford Spencer Ashby, 31, had opened fire on cops who approached him along Mill Street in Brooklyn because he was drinking from an open container of liquor, officials said.
Cops said he fired several rounds at two cops and disappeared into a Red Hook housing project. Cops used his cellphone to track him down in Far Rockaway, Queens, sources said.
None of the officers involved in that incident was hurt.
The cops shot in Sheepshead Bay were recovering at Lutheran, where their families gathered to celebrate Easter and give thanks that the brave heroes survived.
“We’re fortunate that he’s well, and that all the other officers are well, said Ayala’s wife, Maria.
She said her husband called her after the shootout.
“It was comforting that he called and I didn’t have to hear it from a sergeant,” she said.
Both her husband and Keenan, a longtime member of the NYPD Pipe and Drums Band, were already up on crutches walking around and itching to go home, sources said.
Roy Richter, president of the NYPD Captains Endowment Association, added, “It is an Easter miracle that no officers were killed in this barrage of gunfire.’’
Foxworth was released from prison in 2009 after serving 10 years for weapons possession and selling drugs in jail. His record includes a two-year stint behind bars for attempted murder at age 15.
Additional reporting by Kevin Fasick, Julia Marsh, C.J. Sullivan, Kevin Sheehan and Matthew Abrahams