Hundreds mourn slain NYPD cop Adeed Fayaz at Brooklyn mosque
Slain NYPD officer Adeed Fayaz was remembered as “the star” of both his family and his precinct Thursday as hundreds of New York’s Finest gathered at a Brooklyn mosque to pay their final respects.
Uniformed officers lined Coney Island Avenue for at least 20 blocks outside the Makki Masjid Muslim Center, where city officials and cops from Fayaz’s Borough Park precinct joined the 26-year-old dad of two’s heartbroken family for a moving funeral service.
“I don’t want to see any other parents losing their sons, daughters, kids,” his father, Sadigat Fayaz, said through tears, speaking through an interpreter.
“I want this to be stopped with my son, here.”
His widow, Madiha Sabeel, wept as she clutched the US flag from his coffin after it was folded and handed to her after the service.
“Adeed leaves behind a family. Not only was he a police officer, but he was a dad,” Mayor Eric Adams said in his remarks at the funeral, adding, “My heart goes out to Madiha Sabeel. We will continue to pray and lift you up.”
Addressing Fayaz’s two boys, Rayan, 4, and Zayan, 3, Adams said: “Children, there is no story we can give to the loss of a dad.
“There is no word in our vocabulary that we associate what happens when children lose their parents in this magnitude.”
Among the mourners were hundreds of NYPD rank-and-file cops.
“All my fellow brothers in blue here, we don’t just go off and leave anyone,” NYPD cop Kenneth Harrison, a fellow Muslim, said outside the mosque. “We’re all one team. All these officers you see here came to show their respect for our brother who wore the shield.”
Others stood by to offer their condolences and bemoan Big Apple gunplay.
“We show our respect to the family,” said mourner Catherine Lee, whose son, NYPD Officer Kevin Lee, died in the line of duty in Manhattan in 2006.
“No one knows how they go through,” Lee said. “This is not the first. This is maybe the 100th officer we’ve come to give our support to. It’s getting to be a little much.
“The laws have got to change,” she said. “And so we’re here for the families. We just give them a hug. A hug goes a long way.”
“This was a reprehensible taking of a police officer, the violent robbery of a father from his family,” NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell, wearing a hajib, said during the service. “This city needs its good fathers. His sons need theirs.”
Fayaz, a five-year NYPD veteran, was shot once in the head while off duty on Saturday after responding to a Facebook Marketplace ad to buy a Honda Odyssey — only to be ambushed.
Randy Jones, a 38-year-old career criminal, was charged with first-degree murder on Wednesday after he was tracked down to a Rockland County hotel.
Brooklyn prosecutors said Jones fled in a black BMW SUV and was on the lam for two days before being taken into custody with Fayaz’s own handcuffs.
A bullet hole in the getaway vehicle had been concealed with tape, and the cellphone used to arrange for the phony car sale was ditched in an attempt by Jones to throw cops off his trail, prosecutors said in court Wednesday.
Jones was ordered held without bail at his arraignment, with more than 100 stone-faced NYPD officers looking on in solidarity in Brooklyn Criminal Court.
Fayaz and his brother-in-law met Jones in East New York shortly before 7 p.m. Saturday to buy the Honda, with $24,000 in cash stashed in their car to make the purchase.
But Jones allegedly asked the pair if they had a gun, and grabbed Fayaz in a headlock when they said they didn’t — then opened fire and mortally wounded the young cop.
Fayaz’s brother-in-law grabbed the cop’s gun and returned fire as Jones fled.
Fayaz remained on life support at Brookdale Hospital until he was pronounced dead on Tuesday.
“Normally, in our religion, the son gives the shoulder to the father,” his heartbroken dad said during the service Thursday. “But I’m doing the opposite. I’m giving my shoulder to my son.”
The slain cop’s uncle called Adeed “a star of our family.”
“He has always admired the NYPD uniform since he had seen his two uncles wearing them every day, going to work, coming home late, doing whatever they had to do to make their life and their family life easy and worked hard, responsibly, and he did the same,” he said.
After the service, a woman identified as the young cop’s mother, Riffat Perveen, newly arrived from Pakistan, wailed in grief outside as his body was placed into a waiting hearse.
“My Adeed! My Adeed!” she cried.
Outside the Brooklyn mosque, mourners lined up to write a final message to the fallen cop on the back of his portrait, which will be given to his parents as part of a department tradition.
“I’ve been doing this for 17 years for the families because they sacrifice for us,” said artist Kenny Altidor, who painted the portrait. “They give their loved ones who serve and protect the city, and I’m trying to give back with some small token of my appreciation.”
Harrison, the fellow Muslim cop, said mourners will give the slain officer his Salat, or prayer, “because he can’t make his.
“We also pray for the man who killed him and ask Allah for forgiveness for taking one of his believers,” he said. “That is why we’re here today.”
Fayaz was later laid to rest at Pinelawn Memorial Park in Farmingdale.
