A cop-hating Bronx gunman was slapped Friday with a sentence of 23 years to life for shooting a pair of NYPD officers just 12 hours apart in a 2020 rampage, with the judge ripping the unapologetic defendant as a “persistent violent felony offender.”
Would-be assassin Robert Williams, 48, was hit with the concurrent terms on his two guilty pleas to first-degree attempted murder inside a courtroom packed with some 30 uniformed police officers, with one of the targeted cops addressing the court about the unprovoked Feb. 8 shooting that preceded the defendant’s armed assault one day later inside the 41st Precinct stationhouse.
“I hope you suffer every day that you’re locked up,” said Officer Brian Hanlon, whose partner was ambushed and wounded alongside him inside a marked NYPD van. “It brings me joy knowing your life is miserable for the next 20 years. Your joy is over … I hope for everybody’s sake you don’t live very long.”
Hanlon offered his recollections of the random attack that he survived after getting shot in the neck and chin, with the bullets narrowly missing the carotid artery.
“One coward walking up to the car and opening fire,” he told the court. “Someone I’ve never met. It felt like it was happening in slow motion, but in reality it only lasted a minute or two. All I could hear was my partner saying, ‘I got hit. I got hit’ … I felt like I failed that night. The coward got away.”
The unrepentant gunman then stormed inside the Bronx precinct on the morning of Feb. 9, 2020 and opened fire, wounding a police lieutenant and emptying his weapon before falling to the floor in surrender, police said.
In between the two shootings, the callous shooter stopped by a nearby Chinese restaurant for a meal of chicken wings and fried rice. Once arrested, prosecutors said, he threatened to target NYPD officers again.
“I aim to shoot one of you when I get out,” he told a cop inside St. Barnabas Hospital, prosecutors said.
“His words sealed the deal,” said Bronx Acting Supreme Court Justice Ralph Fabrizio. “His statement was that he hates police officers … These are premeditated, horrific attacks that no one could have stopped. They don’t go away from your mind, hearts. And they linger.”
The arrest of Williams, who took a plea deal this past August, was the latest on a long rap sheet beginning at age 17, with the defendant first arrested for a stabbing during a Bronx robbery in 1992 and again nine years later for possession of a machine gun. In 2002, he was convicted of attempted murder after shooting a victim during a robbery and making his getaway inside a stolen car with its female driver still inside.
“That’s my grandson,” his grandmother Mary Williams said Friday. “He was raised up in church and everything. I don’t know what happened.”
The suspect, who served 14 years in the attempted murder case before his parole in 2017, briefly addressed the court in an odd statement before he was led away.
“I’m not a coward,” he said. “They beat me and tased me. They violated me and swept it under the rug. Freedom of speech is dead.”
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