A veteran cop struggling to raise four daughters as a single dad was fatally shot in the face by a remorseless ex-con hunting drugs in a Brooklyn pad, authorities said yesterday.
Decorated Officer and beloved father Peter Figoski, 47, didn’t stand a chance against his killer — who immediately opened fire on the 22-year NYPD veteran after jumping out of a broom closet in the basement of a Cypress Hills building, police said.
“Nobody had any expectations that he would make it,’’ a grim-faced Mayor Bloomberg admitted of the fallen cop, who died at Jamaica Hospital, where his grieving parents and daughters had gathered.
Figoski’s accused killer, Lamont Pride, 27, was captured minutes after the slaying by the cop’s partner, Officer Glenn Estrada. Four more people, including a second suspect in the shooting, were arrested as of this morning and will be charged shortly.
Police arrested a second suspect in the deadly robbery this morning, sources said. Two other accomplices, who posed as concerned neighbors after the shooting as well as a getaway driver, have also been arrested and will be charged.
Estrada had been wrestling with the second suspect when he heard the fatal gunshot and dropped the thug to sprint after Pride. He chased the perp for several blocks before finally nailing him.
“It was an accident,” Pride allegedly later told detectives of the heinous shooting, refusing to even offer an apology for Figoski’s death.
HERO COP LIVED FOR HIS 4 CHILDREN
COP ‘KILLER’ LEFT TRAIL OF VICTIMS
DEVASTATED PARTNER SPRANG INTO ACTION
POST LAUNCHES FUND FOR DAUGHTERS
Pride’s alleged accomplice in the early-morning robbery of a suspected drug dealer at the home at 25 Pine St. remained at large last night. Cops released video they said showed the cohort hurriedly walking down a nearby street — as a police car with its siren wailing raced by — minutes after the shooting.
Sources said police also were questioning a third man who admitted being at the robbery scene at the time and may have been involved in the robbery plot.
Any joy at Pride’s quick apprehension was washed away by a sea of tears from Figoski’s beloved girls — whom he was raising as a divorced dad — and the grief of his parents and hundreds of cops who knew him from Brooklyn’s brutal 75th Precinct.
The two older girls, Christine, 20, and Caitlyn, 18, were rushed by police from their upstate colleges to Jamaica — and didn’t know their father had died until they got to the hospital.
“The [hospital] lobby was full of men and women crying,” said Officer John Giangrasso, the PBA’s Brooklyn North financial secretary, who attended the Police Academy with Figoski and worked with him in the 75th Precinct.
Some of Figoski’s comrades said they didn’t even recognize their buddy when he was first brought in because his face had been so destroyed by the bullet, which entered under his left eye.
He fell so hard after the shot that his 75th Precinct insignia — which had been pinned to his shirt collar — came off and was found in the pool of blood around him.
Around mid-afternoon, nearly 200 current and former cops stood at attention and saluted Figoski’s body as it was moved from the hospital into an ambulance. His organs were harvested for donation.
Those standing in the bitter cold behind the vehicle, hugging one another, included Figoski’s two older daughters and their little sisters, Carolyn, 16, and Corrine, 14. His ex-wife, Paulette, also was there.
The two eldest daughters had been flown to Albany’s airport on a State Police helicopter at the request of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, then flown to JFK Airport, where they were met by a police escort to take them to Jamaica.
Bloomberg, noting he had just met with some of Figoski’s family at the hospital, said, “These conversations, as you might imagine, are the hardest that we have to do and the worst part of being mayor.”
The shooting — the second death of a city cop in the line of duty this year — occurred amid an all-too-routine event in crime-ridden Cypress Hills.
Police said Pride and at least one accomplice went into the apartment just after 2 a.m. Pride told cops “he went to the location to buy marijuana,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
According to Kelly, the tenant said the perps “initially claimed to be police officers. They then demanded money and jewelry. They knocked the tenant down, and one of the men struck him in the head with a firearm.”
Pride, wearing a ski mask and carrying a 9mm Ruger pistol, and his thug pal then grabbed $770 cash and a cheap watch and began to flee, cops said.
But the ruckus was heard by the landlord and neighbors, police said.
When residents spotted one perp carrying a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and Pride holding his 9mm, the landlord called 911, authorities said.
Two cops in a patrol car quickly arrived at the building, followed close behind by Figoski and Estrada in another car.
The first two officers went into the basement, where the perps, after frantically trying to get out of a locked back door, hid in a small room, police said.
The first cops walked by them.
Pride and his accomplice then ran out the apartment door and up the stairs, where they were confronted by Figoski and Estrada, cops said.
Estrada wrestled with the accomplice, while Pride shot Figoski in the stairwell of the basement entrance, authorities said.
The bullet tore through his neck.
When Estrada heard the shot, he ran after Pride, Kelly said.
Police found a silver 9mm Ruger under a parked car nearby. Fifteen feet away, on the sidewalk, cops found a black ski mask.
Inside the basement apartment, cops found a .38-caliber revolver that had been stashed in a microwave, police said.
Pride later told cops that it was the tenant who owned the gun that killed Figoski and that as he wrestled with the cop, he tripped and the gun went off.
Additional reporting by Ikimulisa Livingston, Selim Algar, Kieran Crowley, David Seifman