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From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 3/16/2007 9:14 AM
March 16, 2007
Lives Intersect Violently on a Busy City Street
Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
A bullet left its mark at the Village Tannery on Bleecker Street, where David R. Garvin was killed by the police after three men were gunned down. More Photos >
By MICHAEL WILSON
They weren’t cops’ cops. They weren’t sons of police officers, born with blue in their blood, like many in the New York City Police Department. They didn’t even tell some people about their jobs. Bookish, even naïve young men, each brought an eccentric back story to his role as an auxiliary police officer, and to their partnership on the street.
The younger officer, Yevgeniy Marshalik, 19, whose Russian family fled the war in Chechnya when he was a young boy, was a star member of his high school debating team who would go back to his New York University dorm to tell his classmates tales of the streets.
The other man, Nicholas T. Pekearo, was nine years older, but in a way, more the boy — a crime and comic-book buff, blessed with a vivid imagination and a morbid curiosity, who longed to write his own noir novels, his friends said.
His death could have been a dark ending to one of his own stories. Mr. Pekearo, a salesman at a small bookstore on the Upper East Side, had saved up to buy his own bulletproof vest — the department does not provide them to auxiliary officers .He was wearing it Wednesday night when a gunman killed him with six shots in the torso and shoulder at point-blank range on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village.
The gunman killed his partner, Mr. Marshalik, seconds later with a single shot to the back of his head.
The deaths were captured on a startling surveillance videotape that the police showed on television yesterday.
Police officers chased the gunman, David R. Garvin, who had killed a bartender moments earlier, and fatally shot him on Bleecker Street.
The deaths of the two other men, who had chased an armed suspect — something auxiliary officers are instructed not to do — shocked the city in large measure because they were unarmed volunteers, not full-fledged police officers.
No one felt it more powerfully than the real police officer, Nelida Flores, who trained them. Last night she told a group of auxiliary officers, “They were my kids.”
Friends and family of the two officers, asked what drew them to the role, spoke of their earnestness and altruism, of a simple wish to do good.
“The moment they met, they clicked,” Officer Flores said.
The Marshalik family emigrated from southwest Russia 13 years ago, and Mr. Marshalik’s father, Boris, settled them in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where he opened a practice as a pediatrician. Yevgeniy, who was known to his friends as Eugene, quickly threw himself into school, a driven, curious child who loved the Discovery Channel.
In fourth grade, Yevgeniy won an essay competition about the United States Constitution. “They gave him a medal,” said his mother, Maya Marshalik. “I was so proud, this boy who came here only some years ago. He could become anyone.”
“This city, Manhattan, was his city,” she said. “He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”
At the city’s elite Stuyvesant High School, he was a standout member of the debating team. “The only thing he seemed to enjoy more than debating was helping other kids to learn to debate,” said a former teammate, Zach Frankel, 17. “The fact that he could get up and give an eight-minute speech, impromptu, about issues ranging from the philosophy of Nietzsche to policy in the Western Sahara, in such an eloquent manner, is just a testament to how hard he worked and how smart he was.”
He joined the city’s auxiliary police program early last year, not telling even his mother at first, because he knew she would worry. He tried to calm her concerns, she said, telling her over and over: “Don’t worry, don’t worry. The last time they shot an auxiliary, it was a long time ago.”
“We never pressed him,” she said. “This is what he chose.”
Mr. Frankel, his former debating teammate, was startled to see him in uniform months later: “I see him and he has a cop uniform, handcuffs and a nightstick,” he said. “I remember thinking, is Eugene joking around? He explained it.
“It makes sense to me. He had a real impulse to help people out, and I think he liked the idea of fulfilling what he viewed as a civic duty.”
A fellow auxiliary officer, Glenn E. Sabas, said they were fast friends. They talked about girls, about Mr. Marshalik’s unrequited crush on a woman he had known since he was 11. They talked about the job.
He completed his annual quota of hours on patrol in a matter of few months, Mr. Sabas said. “He loved it,” he said. “He loved going out.”
Mr. Marshalik hoped to become a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office, and Mr. Sabas said he held a part-time job at the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue in Midtown, where he worked as an elevator operator and a doorman. Friends said he was generous with his time, driving once to Binghamton to visit a homesick friend at college there.
“That was one of his most amazing qualities,” the friend, Irina Kaplan, said in an e-mail message. “He was fiercely loyal, and he would do anything for the people he cared about.”
A friend of the Marshalik family, Andrew Zaretsky, 47, said of the teenager: “He always wished to act like a man, a real man. He wanted to protect our society.”
Mr. Zaretsky said relatives who gathered yesterday at the parents’ home in Valley Stream, on Long Island, struggled to understand how Mr. Marshalik could have been caught so defenseless. “They are not blaming the Police Department,” he said, “only questioning why he was so ill-prepared.”
His partner, Mr. Pekearo, grew up in the neighborhood he served. That was the whole idea, said his girlfriend, Christina Honeycutt, 34.
“He’d gone through the dark years of New York City as a kid, tripping over hypodermic needles in the street, and he’d come into this time of relative ease in the city and he just wanted to give back,” she said. “He wanted to help anyone, like talking down a guy who wanted to kill himself one night. Nick was the one who stood with him.”
Mr. Pekearo worked at Crawford Doyle Booksellers on Madison Avenue five days a week for the last five years. “He was steeped in hard-boiled, noir kinds of things,” said the shop’s business manager, Ryan Olsen. “He was our go-to guy for mysteries. He grew up with comics — that was still a love of his.”
He and Ms. Honeycutt met when she started working at the shop in 2004. “He had the classic New York sense of humor,” she said. “Self-deprecating, ironic, sarcastic. You’d feel comfortable with him.”
The couple moved in together and were living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, over a gourmet store. He fed squirrels out on the fire escape. By then, he had been with the police for more than a year, since 2003. He said of his job, “ ‘I know it can definitely be dangerous.’ ” she said. “But he had a lot of faith in the force.”
Besides, she said, Mr. Pekearo rarely encountered serious peril as an auxiliary police officer. “It was a lot more trying to get drunk people rides home,” she said. “Every now and again, he’d go into Starbucks and there would be some riffraff and he’d try to mediate.”
At Hercules Fancy Grocery in the West Village, the owner, Hercules Dimitratos, sold him Gatorades by day and saw him in uniform at night. “He’d pass by all the time and he’d say, ‘Be careful, Hercules,’ ” Mr. Dimitratos said. “He was always giving advice. ‘If you have any trouble, call us.’ ”
He took classes at Empire State College in Manhattan, anticipating graduating within the year, and found a mentor in his literature and creative writing instructor, Shirley Ariker, 66. “He was very inventive, very imaginative,” she said. “He wrote stories about people struggling to do the right thing.”
One novel that several people recalled reading involved a werewolf struggling to do right in a Vietnam-era time of troubles — “how to create good in the world from what is so bad about him,” Ms. Ariker said.
“Nick is a very tender person, a very kind person and a very loving person. I think that’s what he was struggling with. How do you do good in a world where so much bad happens? He talked about his police work as a chance to help people, to do good things.
“I think Nick was a romantic and he wanted to make the world right, like Dashiell Hammett’s characters,” she said. “He wanted to do right.”
The werewolf book had piqued the interest of an editor, and Mr. Pekearo was working on a revised draft. “He was just super talented,” said the editor, Eric Raab, of Tor Books. “I see thousands of manuscripts a year. When I saw his, I thought, man, this guy’s got something I’ve got to nurture.”
His girlfriend said his writing showed a clear-cut moral vision. “A lot of his ideas were about the struggle between death and life, good and evil, justice and corruption. He was a guy who grew up on comic books.”
Another friend, a manager of a condominium building next door, Peter Roach, said he learned only yesterday that Mr. Pekearo was an auxiliary officer.
“If I’d known, I would have tried to talk him out of it,” he said. “He just wasn’t cut out for that. He was a very mild guy. I would have told him he didn’t have the personality. He was a bookworm. I just couldn’t see Nick on the street chasing bad guys. There wasn’t a tough bone in his body, and you got to be tough to be a street cop in New York.”
The police video released yesterday tells a different story. As the gunman runs along the east sidewalk of Sullivan, Mr. Pekearo shadows him on the opposite side.
Both men were well liked at the Sixth Precinct station house where they worked.
They were valuable in fighting quality-of-life and other crimes, like theft, common in a precinct of bars and clubs. “They are our eyes and ears,” one lieutenant said.
At the bookshop, a doorman from down the street approached a bookseller and said only, “Our Nick.”
Both men will receive full police honors at their funerals this weekend. That news cheered Mr. Roach, who imagined Mr. Pekearo hearing it.
“He’d definitely get a kick out of getting full police honors,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/nyregion/16cops.html?ex=1174708800&en=0d57740c08bf322b&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVERNEWS
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