© Courtesy Polanco Family
National Guardsman Noel Polanco was shot and killed by NYPD officers on the Grand Central Parkway on October 4.
National Guardsman Noel Polanco was shot and killed by NYPD officers on the Grand Central Parkway on October 4.
The New York police detective, 39-year old Hassan Hamdy, fired one fatal bullet through the open car window of 22-year old Noel Polanco, who was declared dead within one hour of the shooting.
Polanco was driving himself and two friends, one of which was an off-duty police officer, home after work around 5:15 a.m. After cutting off the cops in their unmarked car - which the trio did not realize was a police car - the three friends were harassed in what they described as "an act of road rage."
The police chased them, "sticking their middle fingers at us and screaming obscenities," said 36-year-old Diane DeFerrari, a bartender who sat in the passenger seat of Polanco's car.
DeFarrari told the New York Post that with rifles drawn, the police officers pulled over the vehicle and ordered Polanco and his friends to put their hands up. But in an instant - before Polanco had time to take his hands off the steering wheel - he was shot dead.
"I heard [Polanco] gasp. He just looked at me." DeFarrari said.
"There was no time to put your hands up at all. They shot in front of my face. Had I moved an inch, it would probably have been me," she added.
