Mayor Adams defended on Tuesday the NYPD officers who repeatedly hit and appeared to use a taser on a man who was holding his one-year old son during a violent confrontation at a Queens migrant shelter last week.
The heated incident, which was caught on camera Friday night and first reported by the NY Times, stemmed from a call about an intoxicated man menacing staffers. It ended with two cops trying to restrain Yanny Cordero by punching him multiple times in the head — once while he was holding the boy — and using a taser.
It is unclear from video of the confrontation whether an NYPD officer actually used the stun gun, or merely brandished it.
“These are very volatile situations. Those officers have to respond accordingly,” Adams said when asked about the incident during a City Hall press conference. “They have to get that child out of that gentleman’s hands after warning him several times, asking him to turn over the child several times. He refused to. He was violent. He was volatile. They had to take that necessary action.”
According to the criminal complaint against Cordero, 47, police allege he was yelling at and threatening to harm staff members at a Jamaica, Queens shelter. When cops attempted to cuff him, Cordero “tensed and flailed his arms as well as twisted and contorted his body.”
Video of the incident shows that, as police confronted Cordero, one officer punched him in the head while he was holding his son. A woman, Andrea Parrar, who police identified as the boy’s mother, can be seen in the video quickly moving away from Cordero after the cop landed the blow to his head.
An officer then hit Cordero in the head at least two more times, the video shows. It ends just moments after an officer unholstered his stun gun.
Cordero and Parrar, 22, are being charged with resisting arrest, three counts of child endangerment, disorderly conduct and 2nd degree obstruction of governmental administration.
Cordero disputed the NYPD’s account of the incident in an interview with the Times, though.
He said he hadn’t had a drink that night and that, once he got back to the shelter after getting dinner for his family, an employee at the shelter slugged him in the face after he attempted to speak English. Cordero said he left the shelter for food because his family didn’t like what they were served at the shelter and that the confrontation began when a staffer attempted to stop him from bringing in food from outside.
According to the NYPD, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services responded to the incident. After Cordero and Parrar were released from jail Saturday night —and after trying to locate their three kids on Sunday — they regained custody of them, the Times reported. Police said the children are one, three and five years old.
During his press conference, Adams contended that, based upon the city’s review of the incident, “those officers took appropriate action,” and he suggested that the initial complaint stemmed from a domestic violence call — not a confrontation between Cordero and staff, as reported by the NYPD.
“The two most dangerous jobs a police officer can go on is, one, a car stop, two, domestic violence,” Adams said. “I don’t know if people realize the number of injuries a police officer encounters when they are attending a domestic violence incident — and that heightens when a person is under the influence of drugs, narcotics, alcohol.
“This person was under the influence of alcohol, holding the child,” Adams continued. “Those officers had to get that child from him.”
The NYPD did not immediately respond to a question from the Daily News about whether Cordero or Parrar were tested for having drugs or alcohol in their systems.
