This chilling video footage shows a wounded cop returning fire on the armed thugs in a stolen SUV who had just gunned down his partner in Brooklyn yesterday.
The dramatic frame grabs, taken from a security camera, surfaced as cops were hunting for the violent, ex-con car salesman identified as a main suspect in the brazen, predawn shooting, which left the partner clinging to life.
“It was a well-executed attack,” said a police source about the ambush that left rookie Officer Russel Timoshenko gravely wounded after taking two bullets to his face, and the cop in these images, Herman Yan, shot in his chest and left arm.
Within hours, police were looking for at least one suspect, a convicted rapist and armed robber from Queens named Dexter Bostic, who is on an intensely monitored form of parole because of his violent history.
Bostic, 34, is a salesman at the Long Island car dealership from which the BMW X5 was stolen.
Authorities last night were questioning Bostic’s brother at the 71st Precinct station house. Two of his pals – one of whom is suspected of being in the SUV with Bostic at the time of the shooting – were being interrogated in the 67th Precinct, a police source said.
A witness to the shooting, Vera Ellison, was taking out her trash at 2:30 a.m. when the thugs started firing from inside the SUV as Timoshenko and Yan approached it during a stop on Rogers Avenue, just in front of the Little Red Riding Hood Day Care Center.
The cops had stopped the car because a computer check showed that its tags belonged to another vehicle.
“It sounded like a battle,” said Ellison, 40. “Kapow! Kapow! Kapow! Kapow! . . . Bullets were flying everywhere.
“I saw [the officers] go down, first one, then the other. They were just laying there. I wanted to go over and help, but I was too scared,” Ellison said. “I got on the phone. I said, ‘Two cops are down!’ ”
Yan told investigators that the SUV’s front-seat passenger first shot Timoshenko through his open window, then reached over the driver to fire at him, a source said.
The BMW then sped off.
Cops later recovered 9mm and .45-caliber shell casings from the vehicle, the source said.
When the gun smoke cleared, Timoshenko, 23, was lying in the street with one bullet lodged in the back of his head and another in his neck, his body cradled by his partner.
Yan escaped serious injury when his bulletproof vest stopped a round to his chest.
“We have every reason to believe his life was saved by his bulletproof vest,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly of Yan, 26.
The BMW was found abandoned four blocks away – its engine still running – at the intersection of Lefferts and Kingston avenues, with a bullet hole in one window.
Nearby, in a driveway through which the perps had fled, cops found bundled together a .45-caliber pistol, a 9mm pistol and another 9mm pistol rigged to resemble a Tec-9 semiautomatic gun, police sources said.
One of those guns was used in a nonfatal, drive-by shooting Sunday in Jamaica, Queens, in which the assailant was riding in a Porsche, and which cops suspect was part of a prostitution turf war, according to police sources.
Cops also are eyeing whether one of the guns was used in a shooting in the past few days in Nassau County.
Detectives yesterday questioned employees at Five Towns Mitsubishi in Inwood, L.I., the car dealership where Bostic works. The license plate that was on the SUV during the shooting had been stolen over the weekend from a Mitsubishi left on the dealership’s adjacent used-car lot.
A female relative of Bostic’s who lives at his last known address in Far Rockaway, Queens, said cops yesterday “busted my door” and entered, pointing a gun to the head of a 15-year-old boy inside.
Cops also went to another Far Rockaway address previously used by Bostic and showed a woman there mug shots of two men.
“We’re gonna get these guys,” one detective vowed, noting there is video footage of the shooting and the suspects ditching the car. “We got their faces, everything.”
As cops looked for Bostic, Timoshenko was in extremely critical condition at Kings County Hospital, where cops and relatives gathered in a vigil.
Mayor Bloomberg met earlier in the day with Timoshenko’s parents for what he called “some of the hardest conversations I’ve ever had to have.”
“I can give them the thanks of a grateful city but, as a parent, I can’t come close to understanding their feelings,” Bloomberg said.
Yan was in stable condition in Kings County.
The officer had been driving the marked 71st Precinct police car on routine patrol in Crown Heights early yesterday, with Timoshenko riding shotgun, when they spotted the 2003 BMW headed westbound on Lefferts Avenue, Kelly said.
The officers decided to check the BMW’s license plate on a laptop computer in their squad car.
When the check came back, it showed that the plate was assigned to a 2007 Mitsubishi Outlander, not the BMW.
The cops flashed their lights to let the BMW’s driver know to pull over, according to Kelly.
The driver did so, after turning north onto Rogers Avenue, and both officers got out of their car.
Yan “approached the BMW on the driver’s side,” Kelly said. “Officer Timoshenko approached on the passenger side, as is the appropriate procedure for a car stop.
“There was no exchange of words. The officers were approaching the vehicle. They had not gotten to the driver’s side window or the passenger’s side window when shots rang out.”
Timoshenko instantly fell to the ground.
At the same time, Yan retreated from the SUV as he apparently was shot in the chest and arm and then fired at the BMW, evidently without hitting anyone inside, according to police sources.
Coincidentally, two plainclothes NYPD detectives were in the area, searching for a suspect in connection with an unrelated double murder. They sped to the scene in their unmarked car and found Timoshenko sprawled on the ground.
Additional reporting by John Mazor, Larry Celona, Selim Algar, Erin Calabrese and Samuel Goldsmith