A Manhattan police officer slain in the line of duty 40 years ago was hailed as a hero at a ceremony today outside the Harlem stationhouse where he worked.
About a hundred people gathered in the heat and humidity to pay tribute to decorated cop and Vietnam Veteran Ralph J. Stanchi, outside the 32nd Precinct on West 135th Street.
Among those in attendence was his former partner, Bob Scanlon, who was with him on that fateful night in 1973, Stanchi’s wife and children and 32nd Precinct Commanding Officer Rodney Harrison.
“He’s just a fantastic indivdual,” Scanlon said today.”It was an honor for me to be his partner. He did two tours of duty in Vietnam and was awarded the bronze star of valor.”
On June 17, 1973, Stanchi, 29, and several officers from the 32nd Precinct responded to a call of a man with a gun inside the Capri bar at 515 Lenox Avenue.
When the officers arrived, they confronted a crazed man holding the bar hostage with a pistol.
“We told him to drop the gun four times,” recalled Richard Chiappa, one of the responding officers that night. “I told him twice and Ralph told him twice.”
“Ralph went to take the gun away and the guy pulled the trigger (several times),” Chiappa said today.
Both Stanchi and Chiappi were hit by bullets, but only Chiappi survived.
A bartender and the suspect were also killed in the ensuing gun battle.
Upon hearing that Stanchi had passed away from his wounds, his fellow officers from the 32nd Precinct were devastated.
“I cried like a baby,” Chiappi recalled. “I was next to him in the operating room.” Stanchi’s wife, Florence, remembered him as a “great guy and a very loving husband,” noting, “He was very proud of his job as a police officer.”