"Detective Trish Heckman heard the gunshots, dialed 911 and ventured from her home into the early morning darkness, as any cop would.
A radio car was already there, and Heckman walked up to tell the officers that she had definitely heard numerous shots. She then saw a man lying in the ice-crusted snow. She would only later learn the victim was himself an off-duty police officer who had ventured out after hearing something.
The sound 28-year-old Police Officer Daniel Enchautegui had heard was breaking glass coming from the building next-door to his basement apartment on Arnow Place. He, too, had first called 911. He told the operator he was a police officer and added he had returned home from working a 4 p.m.-midnight at the 40th Precinct.
Then, Enchautegui ventured into the freezing dark, a gun in one hand, a cell phone in the other, his shield hanging from a chain around his neck. He saw two men bolt from the building next door. He called out.
"Police!"
One of the men fired, and a bullet struck Enchautegui in the chest, slicing his aorta. Enchautegui still managed to return fire, striking one of the men five times, the other twice.
Enchautegui fell back on the snow as his wounded assailants made their way up a block twinkling with Christmas lights. They passed a porch decorated with five big wreaths and big red bows, the red of their blood spattering in the snow.
The radio car cops caught up with the two men as they tried to flee. One got as far as a gray Dodge SUV around the corner on Westchester Ave. He left smears of blood above the left rear wheel and by the driver's side door.
The suspects were taken to Jacobi Medical Center, where Enchautegui had been rushed. The cop proved to be beyond saving. Just five days before, Enchautegui had been among the 20,000 cops who attended the funeral for Police Officer Dillon Stewart. The city now grieved the loss of a second officer so remarkably dedicated he had kept on even after being shot in the heart. He had been a cop to his very last breath.
In another of fate's cruelties, the two suspects in the Enchautegui shooting were both expected to live. One was identified as Lillo Brancato, an actor who had played Robert De Niro's teenage son in "A Bronx Tale."
Neighbors say another actor in the movie, Francis Capra, once lived in the very building where Enchautegui lived. Brancato may have visited Capra here and remembered the block as conveniently located for a getaway.
Or maybe Brancato had seen something valuable in Capra's house, had not known his co-star had moved away and doubled the mistake by hitting the wrong place. Whatever the reason, this was one tale too strange for the movies.
At the heart of yesterday's real-life Bronx tale was the willingness of a young cop who had already worked until midnight to step into harm's way as if it were only natural.
As dawn broke, the block's Christmas wreaths, lights, plastic Santas and reindeer were joined by yellow crime scene tape and numbered yellow evidence markers, one recording where the suspects dropped the murder weapon.
The brightening sun shone on the spot where Enchautegui had fallen after performing his final valiant duty, as pure in his soul as a child falling back in the snow to make a snow angel.
Heckman stood by her car and brushed the snow off the windshield. She was heading in to work, and she had the same purposeful light in her eyes as she had nine years ago, when a cop in her unit was shot to death. The cop's name was Kevin Gillespie.
"He's going to be \[our\] guardian angel," Heckman had said at the time.
Now the Bronx snow bore the mark of another guardian angel. An elderly man stopped and gazed past the yellow tape and asked what had happened.
"There was a cop killed," Heckman said. "A police officer."
The man walked on, and beyond the tape remained that truest and most heartbreaking of snow angels. A helicopter that had joined the flyover at Police Officer Dillon Stewart's funeral Tuesday clattered overhead, keeping watch over this suddenly holy place where Police Officer Daniel Enchautegui had given his life.
Detective Trish Heckman climbed into her car and drove off to spend another tour in harm's way, as do thousands of cops every day. They then go home, but even in this season of Christmas lights and decorations they are never more than a sound in the night away from venturing back into danger, guardian angels for us all. "
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