Cuomo meets with family of second slain NYPD officer

ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo met with the family of the second slain police officer Monday as he warned the fabric of New York City was being torn by a string of tragedies.

The family of Officer Wenjian Liu, 32, “can’t understand why their son, who was a hero and was just trying to help people, is gone,” Cuomo said outside the Brooklyn house the police officer bought two years ago.

“This was his dream, and recently married and it’s all gone,” Cuomo said after meeting with the Liu family. In addition to grief, financial problems are already a concern as to how to pay the mortgage and continue the health treatments Liu was paying for to help his mother, he said.

Cuomo met with the family of the other slain officer, Rafael Ramos, 40, in Brooklyn on Sunday.

Cuomo is calling for calm this week, but struck a harsher tone for police union leaders, activists and elected officials. He said he spoke to the Rev. Al Sharpton, NYPD union president Patrick Lynch, the head of the sergeants association and others.

“The fabric is strained,” said Cuomo, a Queens native. “The best we can do is actually less: Less anger, less emotion, less vitriol, less dialogue. ... the responsible thing now is to bring calm, to bring peace, to bring unity ... everyone has a point of view. We get it, we’ve heard it.”

The officers were fatally shot as they sat in their police car in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, traveled to New York to carry out his plot after shooting his ex-girlfriend near Baltimore. His online postings said he was avenging the controversial deaths of black men by police: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and Eric Garner in Staten Island. Garner died in July after an apparent police chokehold while saying, “I can’t breathe!” Grand juries in both cases decided against charging police officers in the deaths.