June 4 (UPI) -- A Brooklyn police officer is in critical condition after being dragged for 2 1/2 blocks by a stolen car driven by a 15-year-old boy, police said Sunday.
Officer Dalsh Veve had questioned the occupants of black Honda sedan parked in front of a fire hydrant around 11:40 p.m. Saturday, New York Police Department Commissioner James P. O'Neill said at a news conference early Sunday at Kings County Hospital Center, where the officer was being treated. The officer had head injuries and body trauma, police said.
The driver sped off and dragged the officer for several blocks before he was freed while making a turn, police said. After going one more block, the car crashed and the people inside ran off.
The car was reported stolen in Valley Stream, N.Y., on Long Island, about two days prior, the commissioner said.
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Veve discharged his weapon twice.
A 15-year-old boy walked into Brookdale Hospital with a gunshot wound to the face. He was one of three people in the vehicle that struck the officer, O'Neill said.
The unidentified teen was taken into custody and was in serious condition at the hospital.
Two other occupants -- an unidentified 30-year-old man and an 18-year-old woman -- were being held at a police station.
Veve and five other plainclothes officers responded to a report of gunshots in the East Flatbush neighborhood. But officers soon concluded that the reports were most likely caused by fireworks.
The officers then saw the parked car.
Veve, a city police officer for nine years, is married with a 2-year-old daughter.
Veve arrived from Haiti with his mother when he was around 12 years old, according to his aunt, Deliverance Veve.
"Officer Veve represents the American dream -- an immigrant child who came here and has become an exemplary NYPD officer," Mayor de Blasio posted on Twitter.
On Sunday morning, the mayor met with the officer's family at the hospital.
"Once again, we are standing in the hallway of a hospital for a police officer that went out while we were sleeping, went out in the street to make sure there's not gun violence on our street, to make sure we can wake up in the morning in safety," Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said at the news conference. "But because he was willing to do that with his life, he wasn't safe and now he's injured. So we need all of your help."
One of Veve's neighbors in North Baldwin, Long Island, said she was safer because of him.
"Sometimes there's sketchy people on the block and I talk to him about it and he tells us he's watching," said his neighbor, Martha Forrisi, said to the New York Post. "It's like he's always on the job. Such a nice person."
