Authorities on Monday released the last known image of cop-hating gunman Ismaaiyl Brinsley, hoping to retrace his final hours before he executed two uniformed NYPD officers.
Brinsley was caught on surveillance video at the Atlantic Terminal Mall at 12:07 p.m. Saturday, talking on a cellphone and carrying a small white plastic bag that cops believe concealed the gun he used to fatally shoot Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu less than three hours later.
“He’s had that bag in his hand for most of the day,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said at a press conference Monday. “We believe the gun was in that bag at that point . . . there’s a Styrofoam container within that white bag.”
Investigators are asking for the public’s help in piecing together a 2¹/₂-hour gap — from 12:07 p.m. to 2:47 p.m. — between when Brinsley was last seen at the mall and when he told two passers-by in Bed-Stuy to “follow me on Instagram and watch what I do” just before gunning down the cops.
“We don’t know where he was for [more than] two hours,” Boyce said.
Brinsley, who was 6-foot-1 and 235 pounds, was last seen wearing a two-toned jacket with an arrow-head patch on the left chest and camouflage pants, police said.
Police are also examining “several thousand” videos and photos found on Brinsley’s cellphone that was recovered in Baltimore — including footage they believe he took on Dec. 1 of a protest in Union Square Park related to grand-jury decisions in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
“He was not participating in it,” Boyce said. “He was just taking a picture of it.”
Before Brinsley, 28, shot his ex-girlfriend, Shaneka Thompson, in the stomach Saturday at around 5:30 a.m. in Baltimore County, he pointed the gun at his head, threatening to shoot.
“If you call the cops, we’ll both be dead,” he warned her, law-enforcement sources said.
Brinsley then demanded Thompson call his estranged sister, who three-way called his mother, Shakuwra “Cheryl” Dabre, sources said. Thompson begged Dabre not to call the cops, even
though the madman sounded distraught and “suicidal” on the phone, sources added.
She told investigators from her hospital bed that Brinsley never mentioned to her his plans to flee to New York and commit the heinous crime.
At 1:30 p.m., she and her family alerted Baltimore police of Brinsley’s troublesome Instagram posts, according to a timeline released by Baltimore County police on Monday. Forty minutes later, a Maryland detective spoke to a cop at the 70th Precinct station house for a half-hour about Brinsley’s threats and faxed a wanted poster of him at 2:46 p.m.
One minute later, Brinsley opened fire on Ramos and Liu.
“All things were done exactly the way they were supposed to,” Boyce said on Monday. “There was no lapse on anybody’s part.”
Relatives of the gunman told The Post his life was “spiraling out of control.”
“It had nothing to do with police retaliation . . . He was disturbed,” said his sister, Jalaa’a Brinsley, 29.
Jalaa’a, however, displayed anti-cop sentiments on her own Instagram page with a since-deleted rant on police brutality.
“The American dream,” Jalaa’a wrote next to an image of the American flag transposed with hanging bodies. “#fu–thepolice #mikebrown #ericgarner #trayvonmartin #seanbell . . . #ferguson #thelistgoeson #genocide”
She said she cut ties to her disturbed brother — whose lengthy rap sheet involves 19 arrests in Georgia and Ohio for weapon possession, assault and theft — once he turned to a life of violence.
In July 2013, Brinsley allegedly assaulted his then-girlfriend, Preslie Joseph, who was 5-months pregnant with his daughter, kicking down the door to her Canarsie apartment,
squeezing her belly and head — and then brutally head-butting her, sources told The Post.
Brinsley’s heartbroken mother gave no indication she last spoke with her son on Saturday, saying they’d been “estranged for a few years, with occasional contact.”
Additional reporting by Shawn Cohen, Joshua Saul, Joe Tacopino and Frank Rosario