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that morning in Elizabeth, just one NJ Transit stop away from
Linden. That’s when Padilla received the dispatch that would
change his life. Díaz can still remember the feeling he had when
Padilla left the job site to respond to that call.
“We watch all of these cop movies and old-timers will talk
about that sixth sense,” Díaz began. “I’ll tell you, there was
something about when (Padilla) was sent to that call that made
me turn up the volume on my radio.”
When Díaz first heard Padilla’s voice come through the fuzz
of the radio, he immediately put his car in drive to speed to the
scene without even waiting to notify the crew on the jobsite.
Kahana and Hammer also picked up on the familiar voice. The
two were in the middle of a funeral procession when the call for
backup came through.
Kahana was Padilla’s best man at his wedding. Hammer and
Padilla are motorcycle-riding partners. They could hear that
Padilla was in danger and there was nothing that was going to
stop them from backing him up the same way friends or family
would in a crisis.
“When you’ve got a group of guys who are so tight and to
watch them engage in a crossfire with the man who had just
shot me, it’s very traumatic,” Padilla shared. “I didn’t even know
they were coming. They just showed up.”
It’s certainly traumatic enough to watch your closest friends
and partners combat the most wanted man in America while
you lay shot on the pavement, but when Padilla saw another
group of patrol cars arrive in the same direction the suspect
was running, and made out the image of his daughter emerg-
ing from one of the cars, the terror of the moment increased
tenfold.
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NEW JERSEY COPS
■ JUNE 2017
“I was screaming to the patrol cars, ‘stand down, stand down!
The suspect is running your way.’ She was actually the person I
was yelling to and I didn’t even know it,” Padilla reflected on the
powerful memory from that day.
His daughter, Officer Camille Esperra, couldn’t ignore her
father’s call for support and rushed to the scene to make sure
he was alive. Padilla was surprised to see his daughter as she
removed his vest to see if the bullet had punctured his stomach.
He didn’t know she was on duty that day.
“I tried to get here as fast as I could, but it felt like it took
me forever to get here,” Esperra said, rushing to the scene after
hearing her father’s voice mutter the three dreaded words over
the radio: “I’ve been shot.”
The officers who responded to the scene that day all sur-
vived with the man who became known around the world as
the “Chelsea Bomber.” Padilla and Kahana rode to the hospital
in the same ambulance while Hammer was rushed to intense
care for a bullet wound in the skull, earning him the nickname
“Hammer Head” that he still wears proudly. Guzman and Díaz
have since then returned to work as the protectors of Linden.
None of them will ever forget the day terror was stationed
in Linden and the collective effort it took to rid the streets of
the bomber. But, it’s not over yet. As Rahami faces life in pris-
on on eight counts of accusations associated with the planting
and detonation of bombs, Padilla, Kahana, Hammer, Díaz and
Guzman all wait for justice to be served to the man whose map
of destruction was terminated five station stops from where it
harmed 29 civilians in New York, along NJ Transit’s North Jersey
Coast Line.
If not for the actions of these five Linden heroes, think of the
disaster that might have waited at the next stop. d