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| Fair Lawn Police patch |
He couldn't have been more than 10 feet away from the young man who was taking great pains to deliberately aim the .357 in his trembling hand, and though it had been a full moon that night, Clifton Police Officer Steve Farrell would later say that he never even saw the gun.
He hadn't seen it when the first two bullets tore through the abdomen and chest of the Fair Lawn police officer who had rushed to assist him in that churchyard. She was now lying dead or dying a few feet away. He hadn't seen it when the bullet punched a hole the size of a baby's fist through his own right leg just above his knee. He hadn't seen it when the next round blew through his gun hand, wheeling him around and forcing him, in excruciating pain, to summon every ounce of strength he had to muster the three pounds of pressure it took to fire his own Beretta 9 mm at near-point-blank range.
"I tried to reach for the gun ...I pull it out...and pulled the trigger and nothing happened," Farrell told New Jersey Monthly Magazine in a story published last April. "And I'm thinking it's like one of those nightmares cops have. Pull the trigger and nothing goes...so I just squeezed as hard as I could. I figure maybe I'm not pulling the trigger because my arm's damaged...I just squeezed as hard as I could and the next thing you know it was like a double tap. Bang! Bang! And I noticed him flinch on the second bang, you know like he reached for his shoulder or something."
For a moment, Farrell thought he had wounded the suspect. He hadn't.
The truth was, though it was a full moon that night, Farrell hadn't even seen the young cop killer's face. "It was just one of those weird nights where you could look at a person but you could never see their face," Farrell told New Jersey Monthly. "Everything was silhouettes."
It was all a blur. It wasn't exactly panic that gripped Farrell, but it was as close as the seven-year police veteran had ever come to real fear. In just a matter of minutes, a routine motor vehicle stop had devolved into a wild police chase that crossed three towns in two counties. One police officer — Farrell didn't even know her name at that point — was dead. Farrell himself was wounded, and now here he was, face to face with a killer who might just as well have been a ghost.
"Holy shit," Farrell thought to himself. "What the f—k is going on? Where is the cavalry?" He had tried to summon help. He screamed into his walkie-talkie. "Shots fired! I'm hit! Officer down! I'm shot!" But his radio was busted and nothing came back but silence.
Farrell continued firing, every percussion slamming through his own wounded body like a sledgehammer, as the young cop killer walked toward the dead Fair Lawn officer's patrol car, slid inside and sped off west toward Paterson.
And then it was quiet. Wounded, confused, Farrell took a few tentative steps toward the fallen Fair Lawn police officer. Her name, he would later learn, was Mary Ann Collura, a decorated veteran cop who wasn't even supposed to be working that night; she had been filling in for a friend. "I was walking back to Mary Ann to see if she was okay," Farrell recalled. "...I just collapsed and I sat there, and I was kind of thinking, 'now what do I do?'"
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