Louis Lanzano/Associated Press
In the preholiday swirl of Broadway in Times Square, where wide-eyed tourists and time-starved New Yorkers pass through an urban playground vastly different from the one Damon Runyon inhabited, two people came face to face on Thursday morning: a police sergeant and a street vendor.
From inside his unmarked patrol car, the sergeant — in plain clothes — recognized the vendor. He left the car and asked a question. The vendor answered by darting off through the crowd, the sergeant at his heels, running along Broadway.
A quick turn down a side street, another fast turn into a covered outdoor promenade — a gift shop on one side, the revolving doors of a hotel on the other. The vendor pulled something from under his coat: a semiautomatic gun, its 10-inch clip filled with 30 bullets, the police said. Then there were shots, two from the vendor and four from the sergeant.
The vendor fell to the pavement, dying. The sergeant was not wounded. And suddenly, the crossroads of the world was a very public crime scene, and the tourists had a story they could tell when they got back home.
A visitor from Australia, Suzanne Davis, 42, stopped to take images with a video recorder. “It’s my first day in New York, so it makes very real what you see in the movies,” she said.
The drama unfolded around 11:15 a.m., when the sergeant, identified by police officials as Christopher Newsom, 41, confronted two men outside 1515 Broadway, the skyscraper between West 44th and 45th Streets that has the studio most famous as the setting of the old MTV show “Total Request Live.”
Sergeant Newsom is normally assigned to Midtown South Precinct’s peddler unit, but was on loan for the day to an anticrime unit that patrols Times Square. He recognized the two men, who the police said were taking part in a street ruse using compact discs to hoodwink the gullible. Vendors would approach someone on the street, ask his or her name, write the name on a CD and demand $10.
Trailed by a couple of other anticrime officers in plain clothes, Sergeant Newsom asked for the vendors’ tax stamp, something the two men would need to sell merchandise on the street legally.
One of the men, Raymond Martinez, 25, of the Bronx, took off, dashing north and making a left on West 45th Street, the police said. The sergeant ran after him, following as he turned into the promenade leading to the main entrance of the Marriott Marquis Hotel. The police said they had pieced together their account of what happened next from interviews with witnesses and from video from a surveillance camera.
A security guard at the Marquis reported hearing the sergeant yell, “Stop! Stop! Show me your hands!” The guard told the police he saw the vendor pull something from his coat — the submachine gun, which the police said later had been stolen in Virginia in October.
The video showed Mr. Martinez turning, the police said, but he moved out of camera range. Police officials, who did not immediately release the video, said it also showed the sergeant reaching for his weapon and raising it.
It also showed Sergeant Newsom, who has been on the force for 17 years, raising his left arm over his chest in hopes of protecting his heart. It is a defensive move rookies are taught in the Police Academy. Police officials were astonished that the sergeant, less than 15 feet from the stubby barrel of a semiautomatic weapon with no hope of taking cover, was cool-headed enough to remember to do so.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Mr. Martinez fired first, getting off two shots. Then his gun jammed.
Mr. Kelly said the sergeant fired four shots. All four hit Mr. Martinez: in the chest, below the neck and in the left arm; he also suffered a graze wound to the right arm.
Of the two bullets that Mr. Martinez fired, one smashed into the plate-glass window of a souvenir shop in the promenade; the glass shattered, leaving a bullet hole to the right of a “Wicked” snow globe souvenir. The other bullet hit a glass panel near the marquee for the Marquis Theater, in the same building as the hotel.
The police said they found 27 more bullets in Mr. Martinez’s gun.
Dave Kinahan of Boston was standing about 60 feet away, having just pulled up to the hotel’s valet stand in his sport-utility vehicle. His wife, Emma, who is pregnant, was inside, along with their two young children and Mr. Kinahan’s parents. Mr. Kinahan, who was unloading luggage, described hearing at least three gunshots.
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