On her first full day of freedom, Patricia Feerick got up at 4:30 a.m. yesterday to feed her infant son, Joseph, at her Long Island home.
“It was wonderful. It was the best 4:30 in the morning I ever had,” the former city police lieutenant told The Post.
At 7 a.m., a TV crew arrived.
After that, the phone kept ringing. Reporters were asking for interviews, wanting to know how the former NYPD rising star felt about Gov. Pataki’s decision to grant her clemency after five weeks behind bars.
Although Feerick, 40, is very grateful to the media for telling her story, she couldn’t take it any more.
She felt as if she was “being cut up in 20 pieces.”
So she grabbed Joseph and her 4-year-old son, John, and headed to the mall. They went to a toy store and then the library, where they got books on bikes and cars.
Three hours later, she returned to her Nassau County home – where the phone started ringing again.
In 1994, Feerick and three other cops were convicted of illegally searching – and terrorizing the occupants of – two East Harlem apartments linked to the Purple City crack gang while hunting for a stolen police radio back in 1990.
After all her appeals were exhausted, Feerick began serving her sentence Sept. 21 – just weeks after giving birth to Joseph.
She was released from Rikers Island Tuesday and got a hug and bouquet of roses from husband Joe Kossmann.
The first thing she did when she got home was hug John.
“He came darting out of the house. It was the best hug we’ve ever had in our lives,” she said.
When she saw Joseph, her eyes lit up.
“You can’t imagine how thrilled I was. I left an infant. Now, he’s a beautiful little baby,” she said.
Feerick said she has completed 70 percent of a book about her experience. The working title: “Shield of Shame: Morgenthau’s $8 Million Portable Radio,” a reference to the cost of prosecuting the case incurred by Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau.
Although she feels deeply indebted to Pataki, she and co-defendants Myra Schultz, John DeVito and Orlando Rosario won’t stop fighting until they get a pardon.
“We plan to pursue every legal remedy we have to exonerate ourselves and prove our innocence,” she said.