Ruben Diaz (Matthew McDermott)
The cop who shot and wounded an innocent elderly man during a Bronx drug raid was fumbling for a flashlight when his service weapon discharged, a police source said yesterday.
Emergency Services Officer Andrew McCormack — whose hero-cop dad was killed in the line of duty in 1983 — was trying to light up the dark Soundview apartment where a drug raid was under way early Saturday and reached for a flashlight attached to his gun, the police source said.
“He went to hit the button to put the flashlight on,” the source said — but instead, the weapon fired.
The bullet struck José Colon, 76, in the stomach inside the apartment at Westchester and Evergreen avenues.
Colon’s 41-year-old son, Alberto, was arrested and charged with possession of heroin.
The elder Colon — who once worked for state Sen. Ruben Diaz as a supervisor in a home-attendant program — was “doing well” yesterday at Jacobi Hospital and “seems to be well on his way to recovery,” Assemblyman Marcos Crespo said.
The victim got visits Saturday from NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and, according to a City Hall source, Mayor Bloomberg.
The shooting was just a block from where unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo was gunned down by NYPD cops in 1999.
“The Police Department admitted guilt,” Diaz said of the Colon shooting, calling it “the first time ever [the NYPD] said, ‘We were wrong.’ ”
At his home, McCormack yesterday was trying to help his wife celebrate her birthday, said mom Susan, who founded Survivors of the Shield after her husband’s death. “He is doing OK.”
Additional reporting by Jessica Simeone