NEW YORK (AP) – Shortly before emerging from an apartment armed with a fully automatic AK-47, Garland Tyree tenderly told his mother over the phone Friday he had agreed to surrender after a six-hour standoff with police.
“I’m coming out, Mama,” he said, according to the New York Police Department’s top hostage negotiator, Lt. Jack Cambria.
Instead Tyree, a wanted high-ranking member of the Bloods street gang who hours earlier shot and injured a firefighter responding to heavy smoke in the house he had barricaded himself in, fired his weapon at police and was shot and killed in return.
“It should go without saying, but it cannot go without saying, that this is not the way we want these kinds of negotiations to end,” Police Commissioner William Bratton told reporters at a news conference with Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Tyree, 38, was to be arrested early Friday morning at his girlfriend’s apartment in a two-family Staten Island home by four U.S. Marshals and four New York City detectives for violating parole. But he refused to open the door, officials said, and then ignited a commercial-grade smoke bomb, prompting the officers to call the Fire Department of New York.