In a dream she had last year, Anne-Marie Dunn saw herself standing in line to get a runner’s bib for the New York City Marathon.
Dunn had never run a marathon, but that wasn’t the strangest part.
She approached a table, stated her last name and got her bib.
“It said ‘870,’ ” Dunn recalled.
That was the badge number of her dear friend, NYPD Sgt. Paul Tuozzolo, who’d been shot dead in his uniform by a career criminal in The Bronx in November 2016.
“I just had this crazy dream,” Dunn, 37, later told the slain cop’s widow, Lisa Tuozzolo, 42, also a close friend.
If she could make it happen, Dunn then asked, could she run this year’s marathon in his honor?
“Of course! Absolutely!” Tuozzolo said.
Now, against high odds — fewer than 20 percent of those who enter the marathon lottery get in — Dunn is getting a real-life runner’s bib, and will wear it as she runs 26.219 miles on Sunday through the city the cop died protecting.
Her bib will bear Sgt. Tuozzolo’s precinct and badge numbers: 43870 — and the race this year falls on Nov. 4, precisely the second anniversary of Sgt. Tuozzolo’s death.
The 19-year NYPD veteran never had a chance to fire his weapon the day he was murdered.
He and several other cops were all in cars at first, chasing an ex-con named Manuel Rosales, who was driving a red Jeep. They chased Rosales through the streets of Van Nest, a working-class neighborhood south of the Bronx Zoo.
Earlier that day, Rosales had broken into the home of his ex-wife and held her and her family hostage for nearly four hours before fleeing.
The pursuing cops knew what Rosales was driving and spotted him along Beach Avenue. They were able to box in his Jeep with their vehicles near the Noble Playground.
No sooner did the sergeant open his vehicle door than Rosales, still inside the Jeep, fired a .45-caliber Colt semiautomatic, striking Tuozzolo once in the head and once in the chest, killing him almost instantly.
The sergeant was only 41. His last words had been a warning to his fellow officers: “Gun! Gun!”
Rosales was himself fatally shot an instant later, by the new service weapon of Officer Elwin Martinez, a recruit on his third day of field training.
“In my head, he broke his hand, he broke a leg,” Lisa Tuozzolo, now raising their two sons alone, remembered thinking after the first phone call telling her, “Paul’s been hurt.”
At some point, she learned that her husband had been shot, and the prognosis was grim.
“It felt like 13 hours that I was in that [police] helicopter [en route to the hospital], crying,” she recalled.
The two women’s friendship began after they started working together at West Islip HS on Long Island. Tuozzolo, an administrator, was a supervisor to Dunn, an award-winning special-ed teacher. Both were married — Dunn’s husband, Matt, is a pilot — and childless. Then, in 2011, both women learned they were pregnant.
“So we did a whole bunch of the pregnancy things together,” Dunn remembered. “We went to the hospital and did the tour together and Lamaze classes together and all that stuff.”
And although their due dates were six weeks apart, their baby boys, Brayden Dunn and Austin Tuozzolo, were born hours apart on the same day and in the same hospital, one coming four weeks early and the other two weeks late.
Their original plan for that Thursday night — to have dinner together — had suddenly changed.
“I’m in the hospital! Where are you?” they remembered of their ridiculous phone call from across the hallway of the maternity ward at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore, LI.
“The chances of us being in the hospital at the exact same time, day, giving birth, and still having dinner as scheduled …” Tuozzolo said.
“Just in the hospital bed, instead,” Dunn added.
Over the years, with one married to a pilot who took long trips, and the other to a cop who worked nights, the women found themselves packing up their boys and spending sleepovers at each other’s homes.
By the time Tuozzolo’s husband was murdered, they had five boys between them, all under age 6.
“We’ve really been there for each other in different ways and we’ve gotten a lot closer,” Dunn said.
“The stars aligned,” she said. “It’s fate. It’s somebody up there.”
Before the sergeant’s death, Dunn, long a recreational runner, had done half-marathons.
To this day, she has never run 26 miles in one go. Sunday will be her first time doing so.
“It’s intense,” she said recently, of training. “It’s very, very intense. I’m just a recreational roadrunner. I started running about 14 years ago. But when I ran I would want to do fast 5Ks, and the training was different.
“Now it’s longer and slower, and it’s just a different mindset. I had no idea how to run and how to eat and fuel for a marathon.”
She started training on Father’s Day. “I thought it was a very momentous day, being that I was running for Paul — he is a father, obviously. So I said, ‘I’m gonna start. That’s the official start day of my training.’ ”
On the mornings she trains, she rises at 4:15 a.m. Her husband and three boys, Brayden, now 6, and twins Shane and Aston, 4, are still asleep.
She drinks a coffee — “That’s my time.”
Then she starts running by 5, when it’s still dark.
“I wear reflective gear, lights, so that way people can see … it’s very hard, because being a woman outside” in the pre-dawn darkness, “you just get nervous. But you go on streets that are lit, or the safer neighborhoods, if you can try.”
She starts work at 7, leaves by 2:15, then picks up the twins, waits for the older boy to get home by half-past 3 and “then it’s job Number 2.”
“Just suck it up and go out there,” she tells herself on cold, rainy mornings, when she doesn’t want to run.
“You can get through anything. You can just go through, taking it one mile at a time.”
When she runs, she takes a “Paul” momento with her.
Dunn, the sister of a Phoenix, Ariz., homicide detective, sometimes wears a memorial T-shirt — and always one of the Velcro memorial patches made in memory of Paul through Patches4Paul.
The program was created by Lisa Tuozzolo and Paul’s ex-partner, Lt. Emmanuel Kwo, to benefit the fallen cop’s family.
Dunn is running to raise money for the Silver Shield Foundation, which helps families of police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty cover the costs of their children’s education.
“When I run, it’s the toughest times. I just, I stop and I remember my ‘why,’ ” Dunn said of her friend. “She’s my ‘why.’ ”
And sometimes, when she thinks of Paul Tuozzolo, and his sacrifice, the running gets easier.
“I think there’s someone lifting me up. And I just — I don’t know who it is,” Dunn said, beginning to tear up.
Soon, both women were crying, and then laughing, because they realized they were both crying.
“I’m knowing it’s someone,” Dunn added. “And I’m hoping its him.”