Off-duty NYPD cop Adeed Fayaz dies three days after being shot in robbery gone wrong
The off-duty NYPD cop and married father of two who was shot and critically wounded during a botched robbery attempt in Brooklyn over the weekend was declared dead on Tuesday, law enforcement sources said.
Officer Adeed Fayaz, 26, a five-year veteran of the NYPD, had been on life support at Brookdale Hospital since the cowardly attack in East New York on Saturday evening.
He was pronounced dead at 3:25 p.m., sources said. Flags were later seen flying at half-mast at his 66th Precinct stationhouse in Borough Park.
NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell and both rank-and-file and brass from the department were at the hospital throughout the day, comforting grieving relatives, including several who flew in from Pakistan.
“What can you say about a police officer, it’s someone who dedicated their life to serve and protect,” said retired cop Ahmed Nasser, who knew Fayaz from the NYPD Muslim Officer’s Society.
“To me, it’s a family,” Nasser said. “It doesn’t matter if I know them. A cop is a family.”
Hundreds of cops, including top NYPD brass, lined the streets outside of the hospital as officer Fayaz’s body was led into the back of an ambulance destined for the city Medical Examiner’s Office shortly before 7 p.m.
His grieving relatives held onto Fayaz’s two young sons during the somber scene.
A fellow police officer and friend of Fayaz who was outside the hospital described the slain cop as “my own nephew.”
“He was a decent and humble guy. He’s a decent kid. He was doing auxiliary before he joined the police force in 2017. He was an upright guy,” he told The Post.
“It’s an immense loss to the family and to the department,” he said, adding Fayaz’s brother and uncle are in the police department.
Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch said Fayaz’s family was at his bedside when he was taken off life support.
“It’s a difficult day. You see police officers standing shoulder to shoulder with tears in their eyes,” said Lynch.
“This was a police officer who loved his job. Since he was a young person, he wanted to become not just a police officer, but a New York City police officer. He was viciously gunned down in the streets of Brooklyn.”
“The hole in their heart will never go away,” he said about the family. “There is no such thing as closure.”
Fayaz was shot once in the head after he and his brother-in-law responded to a Facebook Marketplace ad for a Honda Pilot and the two were ambushed by an armed would-be robber. The pair had $24,000 in cash on them at the time, police sources said.
The gunman, identified by police on Tuesday as Randy “Popper” Jones, 38, of Harlem, was charged with murder and attempted robbery in the attack, according to police officials.
Jones allegedly lured Fayaz and his relative down a dark alley on Ruby Street, pulled a gun and demanded money — opening fire “almost immediately.”
The cop was struck once in his left temple, with the bullet exiting the back of his skull, and went down.
His brother-in-law then pulled the gun from the cop’s holster and returned fire as the shooter fled.
Jones fled and remained on the lam until cops tracked him down to a Rockland County hotel — where they took him into custody on Monday using Fayaz’s handcuffs.
Police found the getaway vehicle, a black BMW SUV registered to Jones’ mother, on 129th Street and Park Avenue on Sunday and impounded it, with crime-scene detectives examining it at the 75th Precinct in Brooklyn on Monday.
“We will catch the person responsible for this act,” Mayor Eric Adams told reporters at Brookdale Hospital after the shooting. As we see so often in this city, too many illegal guns are in the hands of bad people and doing bad things.”
Cops recovered spent 9 mm shells at the scene, not far from where they found Fayaz’s shield.
Adams said Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Fayaz’s family had been making critical medical decisions about the wounded cop in the hours before he was pronounced dead.
Cops believe the officer’s killer may be behind a similar robbery nearby last month.
In that case, the crook lured another man to a nearby address Jan. 13, again under the guise of peddling a car through Facebook Marketplace, only to pull a gun and demand the victim’s money, sources said.
The thief got away with $18,000 in that robbery.
Other local victims have been lured into ambushes through ads on the popular online marketplace, including a 20-year-old Rockland County man who responded to an ad for a motorcycle in the Bronx in May and was fatally shot.
In October, federal prosecutors announced that a pair of Bronx teenagers separately used the online ad ruse to lure victims into robberies and carjackings.
Those crimes are not believed to be linked to Saturday’s shooting.
Additional reporting by Georgett Roberts and Steven Vago
