A detective was accidentally shot by another officer in Brooklyn early Sunday in an incident that the police had initially described as a standoff with an armed man, who they said shot the detective.
The detective, Robert L. Karroll, was shot once in the back in his bulletproof vest “by what appears to be friendly fire,” the police said in a statement on Monday.
A day earlier, shortly after the shooting, the police said they believed that Detective Karroll had been shot just before 4:15 a.m. by a man who brandished a gun at officers near the corner of Nostrand Avenue and St. Johns Place in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
But four hours later, at a news conference, Police Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch did not specify who shot the detective.
What happened during the encounter was initially unclear because investigators did “not have body-worn camera video of the actual shooting incident, presumably because it happened so quickly and unexpectedly,” Ms. Tisch said at the news conference at Kings County Hospital. Detective Karroll was recovering at the hospital.
Detective Karroll and the other officers were on patrol in Manhattan on the Fourth of July when, just before midnight, they were reassigned to a post in Brooklyn, Ms. Tisch said.
The events leading up to the shooting unfolded several hours later, around 4:05 a.m., when the man, an 18-year-old whose name has not been released by the police, began to talk to four other people outside of a deli on Nostrand Avenue near Sterling Place, the police said. The man pulled out a gun, pointed it at one of them, then walked into the deli.
The man stayed in the deli for a few minutes before leaving. Soon after, he fired at a passing car, striking the vehicle, the police said. The driver, who was working for Uber, and the passenger were not injured.
The man then walked one block south on Nostrand Avenue, and approached the driver side of Detective Karroll’s police vehicle, his gun out. The officers fired, and the man fled on foot, the police said.
The man was arrested around 4:15 a.m., near the corner of Union Street and Rogers Avenue, the police said.
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