WWW.NJCOPSMAGAZINE.COM ■ DECEMBER 2014
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2014 Valor Awards – Silver Medal of Valor
Cutting Edge
What happens when a suspect wields a knife in the dark?
On Jan. 28, 2014, PassaPolice Officer Andrew Mikolajczyk
ic City Local 14 Officers
Police Officer Ruperto Soriano
Andrew Mikolajczyk and
Ruperto Soriano respondPassaic Local 14
ed to a domestic dispute
between a mother and son.
“We didn’t know anything going in, just that the mother didn’t
want her adult son in the apartment,” recalled Mikolajczyk. “That
was it.”
Arriving at the building, the elderly female led the officers to her
apartment. When the officers entered, they encountered the mentally ill son, armed with a large knife.
“In her small kitchen, we saw her son,” Mikolajczyk noted. “He had
the lights off and in his right hand he had a knife. We perceived him
to be emotionally disturbed or intoxicated at the time. And when we
told him to drop the knife, he wouldn’t.”
The officers slowly retreated backward into the living room, but
the son approached further, viciously stabbing at the wall.
“He was angry and saying ‘Leave me alone.’ The mother was
yelling ‘Stop. Stop.’ telling her son not to do anything and getting in
the way of things,” Soriano said. “It got complicated within a minute
or two. Excitement was high. I was thinking ‘this isn’t good.’”
“He was waving the knife back and forth saying, ‘Kill me, why don’t
you just kill me?’” Mikolajczyk added. “And then the mother got in
the way, so now we think that she may get stabbed.”
When the mother finally moved to the side, leaving the knifewielding son within three feet of the officers, he began to charge.
To protect himself and his partner, Officer Mikolajczyk shot the
aggressor.
“You try to do the best you can, and you have everything that
you should and shouldn’t do running through your mind as you’re
giving commands and listening to other people,” Mikolajczyk
explained. “The mother is saying something, the son is saying
something… there’s a lot of stuff going on.”
Soriano, who had only graduated the academy the previous July,
added, “You go to your training. We tried to tell him to stop, but the
most important thing is that we have to go back home to our families.”