June 9 (UPI) — A New York Police Department officer was charged with attempted murder Friday after he was allegedly involved with a road-rage shooting in New Jersey, officials said.
Hieu Tran, 27, who is employed in the office of the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, was taken into custody by fellow NYPD officers and held in New York ahead of extradition to New Jersey.
Officers with the Voorhees Township Police Department responded to a car crash in the Philadelphia suburb around 11:13 p.m. on May 17, the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
There, officers found a 30-year-old man in the driver’s seat of one of the crashed vehicles with a gunshot wound, prosecutors said. He was transported to a local hospital where he remains in treatment.
Investigators identified Tran as the alleged shooter using surveillance video, cell phone records, and ballistics evidence which matched the NYPD-issued firearm provided to Tran.
The public information office — the NYPD press wing — issues email alerts when city employees are arrested, but did not send an alert about Tran’s arrest. According to the New York Daily News, he has been suspended without pay and faced an extradition hearing in Manhattan on Friday.
Tran waived extradition during the hearing, consenting to be transferred. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Pamela Goldsmith wished him luck before remanding him to a court holding cell before he was loaded into the back of a car to take him to New Jersey.
