The Jersey Journal
JERSEY CITY, N.J. — The husband of the knife-wielding Jersey City woman who was shot by a Jersey City cop Tuesday night said yesterday police could have subdued her another way.
“They didn’t have to kill her,” said Wesley Brown, 51, whose wife, Martina Brown, was shot multiple times inside the couple’s apartment at 87 Van Wagenen Ave.
Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy and Police Chief Tom Comey said Tuesday night police officers tried “non-lethal means” to subdue Martina Brown, who had a history of psychiatric problems. But she slashed two officers with a knife and left the cops no choice but to shoot her, they said.
Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio said his “preliminary” assessment is that the police acted in “self-defense and the defense of others.”
“They did try to reason with her. They tried to disarm her,” DeFazio said. “They didn’t fire first, they were assaulted first.”
Brown confirmed his wife was schizophrenic and stopped taking her medications July 16. The night she was shot dead, Brown said, she was acting strangely. She was hyped up and stopped sleeping, getting “worse and worse,” he said.
She was blasting music and when he tried to get her to turn it down she grabbed a knife, he said. This was a far cry from the “nice” and “sexy” woman he married in 1998, Brown said between sobs.
Brown said he called 911 for an ambulance. But hearing that his wife had a knife, 911 sent police as well, he said.
“If I knew they were going to shoot my wife, I never would have called. I thought they were going to take her to the hospital . . . I didn’t think they would be that mean,” Brown said.
By the time police arrived sometime before 9 p.m., Martina Brown had locked herself in the apartment and her husband was in the hallway. Brown said police handcuffed him after he tried to prevent them from putting police tape over the door’s peephole.
“They threw me to the ground,” Brown said. “What they did to me they could have done to her. But when it came to her, ‘pop, pop, pop,’ ” he said, making a gesture of a gun with his hands.
“They wanted to kill her,” he added. “I think they were angry about what they did to that boy on Reed Street,” he said, referring to Detective Marc DiNardo, who died that morning
after being wounded last week in a shootout with two suspects in a brutal shooting. Brown noted that his wife was 5-foot-2.
When Brown returned to his apartment yesterday, there was still blood on the bathroom and bedroom floors, and five bullet holes in the bathroom.
Healy and Comey declined to comment further about the incident yesterday.
DeFazio called the assertion police wanted to kill the woman “absurd. There is absolutely no indication of that,” he said.
DeFazio said the seven officers who entered the apartment - including two from the Emergency Services Unit, the same unit DiNardo was from - tried to subdue Martina Brown using batons.
But she lunged at the ESU officers, slashing one in the arm and another in the forehead, he said. Police asked her again to drop the knife, but she wielded the knife at them, and the officer with the slashed arm fired multiple shots at her.
Asked if it would have been possible for police officers to subdue Martina Brown without killing her, DeFazio said he didn’t have the all the police reports, but “generally speaking, when police are confronted with deadly force then the police are entitled to the use of deadly force in return.”
“If I knew they were going to shoot my wife, I never would have called. I thought they were going to take her to the hospital ... I didn’t think they would be that mean.”
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