(Reuters) – Two New York City police officers who were shot and wounded earlier this week while responding to a domestic dispute were discharged from hospital on Thursday in time to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with their families, the city’s police commissioner said.
Joseph Murphy and Christopher Wells departed the hospital in the city’s Queens borough in wheelchairs and were greeted with cheers from dozens of their fellow officers, according to video released by the commissioner, Dermot Shea.
“After being shot in the line of duty protecting a domestic-violence victim, Officers Wells & Murphy leave the hospital today to continue their recoveries at home with loved ones,” Shea wrote.
Both officers had been rushed to the hospital on Tuesday, one suffering a gunshot wound to the upper thigh and the other to the hands. They were in stable condition and had been expected to recover.
The incident started when the two officers accompanied a woman, who was not identified, to her house around midday after she filed the latest of several domestic violence reports at a local police precinct, Shea had said.
Shortly after the officers and the woman entered her home in a neighborhood of modest houses near John F. Kennedy International Airport, the gunman appeared and started shooting, according to Shea.
The officers returned fire and killed the suspect, who has been identified as 41-year-old Rondell Goppy. Goppy worked as a peace officer at City University of New York, had a firearms license and no criminal history, police said earlier this week. At least two handguns were recovered, they said.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
