Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly also said Wednesday that Mr. Ortiz, who is still in custody, had 14 previous arrests.

Officer Brennan was reportedly in critical but stable condition and in pain on Wednesday, Commissioner Kelly said.

[7online.com]

The commissioner’s face was stoic, betraying no emotion to the assembled members of the print and television media gathered in the lobby of Bellevue Hospital Center late Tuesday night.

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly at Bellevue Hospital Center Tuesday Night

Just minutes before Mr. Kelly arrived to the podium with Mayor Mike Bloomberg, those members of the press exchanged anecdotes to one another about their work covering the alleged rape case involving Greg Kelly, Mr. Kelly’s son and a well-known TV personality on Fox 5’s “Good Day New York.”

There was no mention of Greg’s name in the press conference. Instead, the commissioner calmly laid out the circumstances surrounding the shooting of 29-year-old Officer Brennan, a six-year veteran of the force, who chased a suspect into the hallway of the Bushwick Houses in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and narrowly escaped death.

At 9 p.m. this evening, Officer Brennan and two other officers, all plainclothes members of Brooklyn Patrol Borough North’s anti-crime unit, were responding to radio calls of shots fired in the vicinity of 140 Moore Street.

When responding, they encountered three individuals fleeing from that location and the officers gave chase. Officer Brennan followed one individual whom all three officers recognized from “past encounters,” said Mr. Kelly.

That man, later identified as 21-year-old Luis “Baby” Ortiz, ran into the rear entrance of 370 Bushwick Avenue, part of the Bushwick Houses, a housing project, with Officer Brennan running behind him.

In a very short distance between the two, Mr. Ortiz “turned and fired one shot, striking officer Brennan in the base of the skull,” said Mr. Kelly.

Officer Brennan fired one shot in return, which was believed to not have struck Mr. Ortiz.

As this was happening, Officer Brennan’s two colleagues had difficulty opening the door to the rear entrance of 370 Bushwick Avenue that apparently closed after Officer Brennan followed Mr. Ortiz inside the building, Mr. Kelly said. The two heard both shots being fired and forced the door open, discovering the wounded Officer Brennan on the ground.

Mr. Ortiz then escaped to the fifth floor of the building as responding members of the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit started their search for the young suspect.

He was later arrested in apartment 5A in 390 Bushwick Avenue, a building close to where the shooting took place. Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Ortiz was also wanted for questioning in connection with a homicide that happened earlier in January.

Officer Brennan, meanwhile, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital Center. There, Dr. Ronald Simon and his staff of trauma surgeons used fluid and pressure to excrete the bullet from just behind his right ear, said Dr. Eli Kleinman, the supervising chief surgeon of the NYPD.

He was conscious throughout the entire procedure, said Mr. Kelly, and was later joined by Officer Brennan’s parents and wife Janet, who just 6 weeks ago gave birth to a baby girl named Maeve.

In a macabre moment during the press conference, Mr. Kelly asked Dr. Kleinman to hand him the plastic container holding the bullet.

Mr. Kelly took the plastic evidence bag from Dr. Kleinman and removed the container, its insides bloody from the bullet that had been just moments ago been removed from Officer Brennan’s skull.

“He is one lucky young man,” said Mr. Kelly, holding the container up for the press to see.

Indeed, Officer Brennan was lucky. On December 12th in Cyprus Hills, Brooklyn, Police Officer Peter J. Figoski and his partner were responding to calls of a robbery in progress when he was shot in the face by suspect Lamont Pride as he was trying to escape.

The bullet struck Officer Figoski below his left eye and exited the back of his head. He was rushed to Jamaica Hospital, where he was pronounced dead five hours after being shot.

Officer Brennan, who was alert and talking with doctors and his visitors following his surgery, was expected to make a full recovery.

For Mr. Kelly, the shooting was just the latest test in a particularly trying period in his otherwise vaunted tenure as police commissioner. His son, recently accused of rape, is being investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. He and Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Paul Browne caught the ire of the Muslim community for Mr. Kelly’s appearance in “The Third Jihad,” a controversial documentary on American Muslims (which Mr. Browne gave conflicting statements explaining Mr. Kelly’s involvement in the film).

But there, in his hands, was a container holding that bullet that nearly claimed the life of another one of his men. Luckily for Officer Brennan and for Mr. Kelly, Mr. Ortiz had aimed poorly.

drosen@observer.com

“Couldn’t you imagine being locked up there?” Ms. Blum said. She smiled giddily and then shook her head. Even though it has stood mostly empty since 1984, the former asylum still looms over the East Side of Manhattan (a few blocks from the new in-use facility), eclipsing the nearby streets in tangled shadows, the chill air rife with the ghosts of nearly two centuries of violent deaths. In her latest book, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Ms. Blum, who teaches science writing at the University of Wisconsin, excavates the hospital’s Stygian history and, in the process, rediscovers a New York that’s been nearly forgotten: a time of Prohibition and the corrupt political bosses of Tammany Hall; a time when death certificates simply read “act of God” and murder by poison was easier to get away with than taking a sip from a good bottle of store-bought whiskey.

Acting in these dark times was the city’s first chief medical examiner, Charles Norris. Mr. Norris inherited all the trouble that came with New York City’s medical system in 1918. But with a team of talented chemists, led by the obsessive experimenter Alexander Gettler, he created the field of American toxicology out of test tubes and patience.

“I’m a really good friend to dead scientists,” Ms. Blum said as we walked through Bellevue’s main lobby. The hospital’s past threatens to overcome all of its progress—physically, even. Among the metal and glass of the modern front entrance are the remnants of the original hospital, with its separate brick entryway for “EMPLOYEES.” Ms. Blum smiled again. “These guys were so heroic in what they built and they’ve been forgotten.”

Almost. Separating her book into 11 chapters—each dedicated to a different poison—Ms. Blum meticulously traces the story of Norris and Gettler as they attempt to straighten out a wretchedly dysfunctional medical and judicial system. Norris’ story starts with Frederic Mors, a quiet orderly at the German Odd Fellows’ Home in Yonkers. The surname is Latin for “death.” He used chloroform to kill his sick patients.

“I did it to end their suffering,” he confessed to the police. But the perpetually “skunk-drunk” Manhattan coroner couldn’t find enough evidence to convict Mors. The nervous, chain-smoking murderer disappeared and was never heard of again. It was typical in a time before forensic science; the only evidence of the murder was the deceased’s ambiguously damaged stomach.

But as Norris’ ability to pinpoint the symptoms of murder by poison became more instinctual, the cases that passed across his desk only got stranger. There was Ruth Snyder, who killed her husband with the help of her boyfriend, first using mercury bichloride, then a dose of chloroform, then several tumblers of alcohol, then a lead weight to the head, finishing off with a picture wire pulled around Snyder’s neck.

Or Mary Frances Creighton, a gorgeous young mother with curly black hair, accused and acquitted of murdering her brother with arsenic for a $1,000 life insurance claim in 1923. She lived quietly until 1935, when a Long Island housewife began vomiting violently and suffering severe abdominal pains. She died a week later, killed with a hefty dose of arsenic. Fanny Creighton was her neighbor. She was too terrified to walk to the electric chair at Sing-Sing, so she was carried. She clutched a rosary as she sat in the chair, but threw the beads on the floor.

“I had to close the computer and leave the room!” Ms. Blum said of writing about such disturbing subject matter, but she isn’t quite as coy in the book. All the nitty-gritty about death by arsenic, by thallium, by wood alcohol, is here in precise, gruesome detail. It makes for a stomach-churning read—and made me wary, for a few days at least, of going to restaurants where I couldn’t see my food prepared. (Who knows what kind of access disgruntled kitchen workers have to arsenic?) But Ms. Blum’s combination of chemistry and crime fiction creates a vicious, page-turning story that reads more like Raymond Chandler than Madame Curie.

“Everything is chemistry,” Ms. Blum told me back in front of the rusted gates at Bellevue. “It’s really beautiful when it’s broken down into its material components.” She hesitated. “And it’s really sinister.”

“Oh, I wore my poison ring for you,” Ms. Blum said, unprompted, and lifted her hand to my face. The ring boasts a stone of Persian turquoise from the 1880s, beautiful, and bright sea green. With an easy click, Ms. Blum removed the stone from its placement, revealing a small compartment behind it where a tiny capsule of poison would have been hidden. With another giddy smile, Ms. Blum put the stone back in place. “I’m such a nice little person to be attracted to things that are so twisted,” she said.

mmiller@observer.com

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