UPDATE: Officer Salerno on The Road to Recovery

Police now believe that Santiago Urena was shot by Salerno

By Alicia Cruz

The Black Urban Times

A 911 call to a Bronx housing project earlier this week, left NYPD officer Robert Salerno unable to speak, but his writing is just fine. Salerno, who is recuperating from three gun shot wounds at Lincoln Hospital, has spent the last few days talking to investigators through pad and pen.

In one of his notes he called his fellow officers "heroes" after all three were involved in a shoot-out with a mentally unstable man who barricaded himself in his mother's apartment after an altercation with his mother's home health aide.

"He made it a point to show me what happened and called the three officers who were with him 'heroes,' " Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told the New York Post.

"He drew a diagram showing the apartment, showing the bedroom, showing where he was when he was hit."

Investigators now believe that Salerno shot Urena, 57, in the abdomen, right shoulder and right temple, fatally wounding him. Salerno, a three-year veteran of the NYPD, has undergone surgery on his bladder and had a part of his small intestine removed.

Salerno was shot from less than two feet away as he opened the bedroom door of the room Santiago Urena had barricaded himself in when the shots began.

Salerno's partner, Officer Robert Klein, stayed at the door providing cover fire as fellow policeman Daniel Robbins and Sean Fitzpatrick dragged a bleeding and wounded Salerno out of the line of fire.

"They had to go in front of the line of fire to save him, to rescue him," Kelly told the New York Post.

Salerno was screaming in pain, "I don't want to die! I don't want to die! Get me out of here!" a police source said. The exchange of bullets lasted less than five seconds.

"There is no doubt that these officers saved Officer Salerno's life," said Officer Joseph Anthony, a Patrolmen's Benevolent Association's board member representing The Bronx.
Reports in state that Urena had threatened to kill the home health aide, Yesenia Rodriguez, who cares for his 92-year-old mother after Rodriguez rejected his romantic gestures.

Police sources told the New York Post that Urena "frequently quarreled with Rodriguez, alternately pestering her for dates, then arguing with her on how his mother's welfare benefits were spent."

"[Urena's] brother said he [also] had been distraught over the fact that he had lost his job," Kelly said, adding that when Rodriguez called her husband in the Dominican Republic, that "somehow set him off."

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