NEW YORK (AP) – A New York City police officer who has been arrested twice for alleged brutality was arrested again on Sunday after police on Long Island said he fired a gun off-duty in the Atlantic Ocean.
David Afanador, 39, was carrying a loaded 9mm Beretta pistol and three loaded 15-round magazines when officers investigating a report of shots fired in Long Beach saw him walk off the beach with three other people, the police said. .
Afanador was charged last year with placing a black man in a prohibited stranglehold while responding to a phone call on a boardwalk in Queens. The NYPD suspended him without payment after that arrest and then placed him on a restricted assignment. He was not authorized to carry firearms, police said.
A spokesperson for the NYPD, Sgt. Edward Riley, said Afanador has been suspended unpaid again.
Afanador was indicted by video in Long Beach City court on Monday on charges of criminal possession of a weapon and prohibited use of a weapon. He was also cited for possession of alcohol, which is illegal in Ocean Beach Park, for wearing an open can Truly Hard Seltzer, police said. His next appearance in court is scheduled for April 2.
A woman who quit Afanador was also charged with firing the gun into the ocean. She is charged with criminal possession of a weapon and prohibited use of a weapon, police said.
A message was left asking for comment from Afanador’s attorney.
Afanador, who has worked at the NYPD for over 16 years, pleaded not guilty to strangulation last June and tried aggravated strangulation allegations after a cell phone showed him putting his arm around a man’s neck on the Rockaway Beach boardwalk. .
The man, 35-year-old Ricky Bellevue, seemed to lose consciousness. Bellevue was arrested a few weeks later in an unrelated incident in the Bronx after police said he flashed a box cutter and made anti-gay statements in an attempted robbery.
Chokeholds have been banned by the NYPD for years and were banned statewide last year. Afanador is scheduled for Wednesday in that case.
In 2016, Afanador was acquitted on charges of hitting a 16-year-old boy with a gun during a marijuana arrest, breaking two of his teeth. The beating, seen on video, continued until the boy fell to the ground and was handcuffed.
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