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Confronting police officer suicide
By Bart Jones and John Valenti
Newsday (New York)
NEW YORK — A sea of blue.
Wearing their police uniforms, they arrived in Islip Monday morning by the hundreds, there to honor their fallen brother, NYPD Lt. Michael Pigott.
The Emergency Service Unit lieutenant from Sayville killed himself on Thursday morning, eight days after ordering an officer to use a Taser on a man who wound up falling to his death.
“It’s a horrible, horrible thing,” NYPD Officer Kerryann Douglass said. “He was a great man. He was a cop’s cop.”
An hour before the funeral at the United Methodist Church of Islip, two fire trucks were parked on each side of Main Street, ladders extended about 40 feet into the air and meeting halfway across. A large American flag hung from the ladders in preparation for the funeral procession.
Pigott was found dead early Thursday in a locker room at the unit’s headquarters at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
The lieutenant had been put on modified duty after ordering the use of a Taser on a mentally distressed man who was naked and screaming on the ledge of a Brooklyn apartment building, waving a fluorescent light tube at police.
Once Tased, the man, Iman Morales, 35, collapsed, unconscious, and fell 10 feet to the pavement below. Morales hit his head and died.
After the incident, Pigott was reassigned to NYPD Fleet Services in Queens. Citing his failure to follow procedure, the NYPD stripped Pigott of his gun and badge.
A few days after the incident, Pigott told Newsday in an exclusive interview:
“I am truly sorry for what happened to Mr. Morales. I feel terrible about what happened to the man.” The married father of three added: “I’ve been a police officer for 21 years. And I loved being with the Emergency Service Unit.”
At his wake over the weekend, friends praised Pigott as a good cop, a good man, who made a decision that haunted him.
“It’s a gut-wrenching situation,” a New York City highway patrol officer who declined to identify himself said down the block from the church Monday morning. “I feel compelled to come out and show respect for the family.”
Copyright 2008 Newsday (New York)