The ex-con who shot two cops in a Bronx housing project went there with two pals to buy pot — but instead was trying to rob them when he was confronted by the officers, law-enforcement sources said Friday.
Career criminal Malik Chavis, 23, along with Franklin Salgado, 34, and Darrell Boylan, 27, walked into the Melrose Houses at 320 E. 156th St. Thursday at about 8 p.m. and took the elevator to the sixth floor, where Chavis pulled a pistol and announced the stickup.
A woman stepped from another elevator, interrupting the robbery, and the trio ran to a stairwell, where they came face-to-face with Officers Patrick Espeut, Diara Cruz, Phillip Pena and Antonio Desucre, who were on a routine vertical patrol in the crime-ridden project.
Boylan fled and cops asked the other two for ID. Salgado complied, but Chavis, who was armed with a .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol and had a sawed-off shotgun in a duffel bag, said he needed to go to a seventh-floor apartment to get his.
Instead, he climbed to the seventh-floor landing, wheeled around and fired three rounds from the pistol, striking Cruz, 24, in the abdomen below her bulletproof vest and Espeut, 29, in the face, with the bullet grazing his cheek and nose, sources said.
Chavis then screamed at the cops to shoot him, a law-enforcement source told The Post.
“He wanted to die by suicide-by-cop. He shoots the cops. He then starts shouting, ‘Shoot me! Kill me’ to the cops before he ends up killing himself,” the source said.
Espeut and Pena fired three shots at Chavis but missed, and he then burst into apartment 7J.
“He said ‘I just shot this bitch.’ My daughter said ‘What bitch?’ He said ‘I just shot a cop in the face.’ So I was like, ‘Why you did that, why you did that?’ ” said Wanda Simes, 56, who lives in the apartment with her daughter Belinda, 29, who was dating Chavis.
“I said, ‘Malik what are you going to do, you have this gun in your hand?’ ” said Simes, who was home with her daughter, three children and a man identified as Michael Fagnani, sources said.
Chavis showed Fagnani, 22, the shotgun and asked Michael to kill him, but he refused and told Chavis to get rid of the guns.
“ ‘Yo, you gotta throw that out the window,’ [Fagnani said]. By the time we looked out the window, we saw all this police out there so he couldn’t throw it out the window,” Simes said.
“[Chavis] called his father and he said ‘I love you.’ He gave her [Belinda] a kiss. Then he went in the room and he shot himself,” Simes said.
“He just kept saying, ‘I’m dead. I’m sorry. I’m done. I’m not going back to jail.’ ”
The guns were recovered from the apartment. Chavis had a rap sheet including at least a dozen busts for drug, larceny and other charges and got out of prison in December 2014 after serving five years for robbery.
He could have faced life behind bars if convicted on the weapons charges because of his record.
Both officers were rushed to Lincoln Hospital, where Cruz underwent surgery to repair organ damage, sources said. She was in serious but stable condition.
Espeut was released Friday afternoon as scores of uniformed cops broke out in cheers and the NYPD’s Pipes and Drums band played.
Asked how he felt, Espeut said, “Pretty good,” and gave a thumbs up as he was wheeled to a waiting NYPD van.
Boylan and Salgado have not been charged. Sources said Salgado even comforted the wounded Cruz as she was brought to an ambulance, telling her she would be OK.
Sources said the firearm Chavis used was purchased along with three other semiautomatic pistols and a revolver in June 2010 at a Nashville gun shop by a man with both a Tennessee address and one in The Bronx that is in the vicinity of Chavis’ home at 921 E. 180th St.
Both Espeut and Cruz are two-year veterans. Espeut also serves as a sergeant in the New York Air National Guard shooting videos. He captured the US return of the body of NYPD Detective Joseph Lemm, 45, who was killed by a Taliban assassin in Afghanistan.
Additional reporting by Leonica Valentine, Georgett Roberts and Bob Fredericks
