While an NYPD officer was fighting for his life, a local New York City politician was busy supporting his attacker in front of news cameras.
During an arrest of a suspect Friday, officer Lesly Lafontant was brutally beaten over the head with a chair by a bystander in a senseless assault, the New York Daily News reported.
Despite being bashed by a metal chair, Lafontant was able to draw his weapon and kill his attacker. The officer was rushed to the hospital and put into a medically induced coma due to the seriousness of his injuries.
While Lafontant was struggling for his life, however, Democratic state Assemblywoman Latrice Walker was busy talking to reporters at the scene.
“Children were running. My daughter was screaming,” Walker said, according to the Daily News. “If there was a fight taking place, this could’ve been handled differently. I feared for my safety and the safety of my child.”
he lawmaker was in a neighborhood coffee shop when she heard the shooting.
“A young man is now dead because of an interaction with the police,” she said.
Kwesi Ashun, the man who nearly killed Lafontant, had a history of attacking police officers. A police blotter from 2004 reveals another violent encounter he had with cops.
In the 2004 incident, Ashun, armed with two knives, slashed an officer “on the left side of his head, opening a cut from his ear to his neck.”
According to his family, he suffered from bipolar disorder, the Daily News reported.
Lafontant is now in the middle of a lengthy recovery and was released from the hospital to the roars of a cheering crowd. Flanked by friends and family, he was beaming.
To go through what Lafontant endured and discover that a politician immediately jumped to the attacker’s defense would come as a shock to anyone.
Despite Ashun’s serious attack, Walker said that “this young man did not have to die,” and called the killing “senseless,” according to NY1.
If Walker had been the one brutalized by a metal chair, she may not have seen the death as completely senseless, but rather as necessary to save an officer’s life.
Unfortunately for Lafontant and other NYPD officers, this is what passes for leadership in their city.
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