They couldn’t shoot straight when they most needed to.
Cops’ missed shots with guns and a Taser compounded the woes faced by an Upper East Side family in a harrowing domestic violence incident that hospitalized suspect Edgar Soto, 22, and his mother Flora, 49, authorities said.
Cops mistakenly shot Flora Soto twice in the buttocks in the shooting Monday afternoon, sources said.
After he was felled by three police bullets in the incident, Edgar Soto told cops they’d done right: “Good thing you got me. Somebody was going to be killed today,” he said.
He has a long history of assaulting his family — cops had been to the home seven times between December 2007 and March, records show.
Soto’s sister, Diana, admitted yesterday that she covered up two unreported incidents in which her brother cut her with a knife.
The most recent incident was last Wednesday, when Edgar Soto, cut her in the neck, officials said. She was also stabbed in the lower abdomen in mid-February, said sources.
As Soto held his mother at knifepoint on Monday, a police sergeant yelled to Soto: “Drop the knife! Drop the knife!”
When Soto failed to obey, the sergeant fired at him with a Taser, a weapon that shoots electrically-charged wires meant to shock their target, according to the account by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.
But the sergeant’s Taser shot missed, cops said.
After the Taser misfire, Edgar Soto lunged at officers with a 8 1/2-inch serrated knife. Two cops opened fire.
Flora Soto, who was behind her son, was struck once in the left buttock and once in the right buttock, cops said. Earlier, cops had said Flora Soto — a mental health counselor and Bronx Community College instructor — was hit only once.
Police bullets hit Edgar Soto twice in the abdomen and once in the scrotum.
Mother and son remained at New York Hospital. Their wounds are not life-threatening.
Cops are still investigating the shooting — “but preliminarily, it appears that procedures were followed,” Kelly said.
Tests showed that the Taser had been operating properly, said sources.