The new police widow — and the sergeant her husband saved in his final moments — met with a tearful embrace, in a hospital conference room.
“He walked into the room and he just said, ‘I’m sorry,’” Lisa Tuozzolo told The Post recently of the first time she saw Sgt. Immanuel Kwo.
“And I just cried.”
Sgt. Paul Tuozzolo — a loving husband, and dad to two preschooler sons back home on Long Island— had been fatally shot that November 2016 day on a Bronx street.
Kwo was a step behind him, and Tuozzolo’s final two words had saved Kwo’s life:
“Gun! Gun!”
A second later, bullets from a parolee’s Colt 45 struck Tuozzolo’s head and chest. Kwo was struck once in the leg, but the warning Tuozzolo called out with what would be his last breaths had given Kwo time to take cover behind a truck.
Tuozzolo’s warning had also saved the lives of five other cops, including the young trainee, Officer Elwin Martinez, who assumed a combat stance, raised his brand new service weapon and killed the gunman.
Both Kwo and Tuozzolo, one bleeding and one nearing death, were rushed together in a police van to Jacobi Hospital.
“The other officers were holding on to his head, talking to him, telling him to stay with us, we’re almost there,” remembers Kwo.
Hours later, the new widow hugged the wounded sergeant.
Lisa Tuozzolo and now Lt. Immanuel Kwo remembered the moment recently, after Kwo was honored for his bravery at the Sergeants Benevolent Association Sergeants of the Year luncheon.
“They’d moved me into a conference room, because of the amount of friends, family, colleagues,” said Lisa, who was at the lunch “to show my love.”
“For someone who lost so much, she has this ability to lift people up,” said Kwo of meeting Lisa.
“At that moment [in the hospital] I felt so terrible. I was like, ‘Your husband saved me. Here I am. I have no words to say to you to make it better.’
“But here you are comforting me, even though you have to now go on with your life.
“This was the first time we met,” Kwo remembered. “For her to just take me in her arms — because that’s what she did. She took me in her arms and just held me while I’m breaking down.”
“I wouldn’t have looked at it as me comforting him,” Lisa demurred.
“I just thought it was two people that are now bound by a horrific tragedy and now needing to take steps together to figure out what to do next.”
The two families — Kwo and his wife, Sherry, expect their first child in March — have remained close these ten months.
“He’s a member of my blue family,” says Lisa.
“He plays an important role with my family, with my kids. He was there with my husband, and he, along with another handful of officers —”
Here, Lisa began to cry, then composed herself.
“He was there with my husband and gave him whatever comfort they could, and held him, to try to save him.”
She added, “My husband might have yelled ‘Gun’ and saved six people’s lives at that moment.
“But they were there with my husband when I couldn’t be.
“And as much as they could, they tried to save him. They tried to hold him and get him to that hospital safely.”
Now, she calls him “Manny,” and he calls her, “My person.”
“I never met Paul’s wife before that night,” Kwo told The Post.
“Ever since then, you know, we always joke around with each other. I always say, ‘She’s my person.’” Kwo said.
“And I really can’t explain what that means to people,” he said.
“It’s just, you know, we’ve developed a friendship, a bond, between us and the kids that I really treasure.”
Added Lisa, “The best thing we can do, both Manny and I together, both for me, and for my boys, is to do what Paul represented. And to live our lives being the best we can be for everyone going forward.
“I think we’re all living to make Paul proud.”