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Police Shoot and Kill Knife-Wielding Queens Man

By Jess Wisloski | September 8, 2012 6:40pm | Updated on September 9, 2012 3:09pm

SPRINGFIELD GARDENS — A police officer shot and killed a distraught 26-year-old man Friday afternooon after the man moved towards the cop while holding a knife, police said.

It was the second fatal police-related shooting of the day. Officers arrived at the house on 144th Terrace following up on a report that Walwyn Jackson, 26, was holding a knife to his own neck at 4:46 p.m., police said.

On arrival, the officers found Jackson, a brand-new father, on the second floor of the Springfield Gardens home, holding a kitchen knife, and they commanded him to drop it, police said.

Jackson, who had been depressed, family said, refused and began to advance towards the police officers with the knife in the air, police said. An officer, who has not identified by the NYPD, fired at Jackson, striking him in the shoulder, police said.

A knife recovered from the scene where a 27-year-old charged a police officer wielding the weapon, police said, on September 7, 2012.
A knife recovered from the scene where a 27-year-old charged a police officer wielding the weapon, police said, on September 7, 2012.
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NYPD

Jackson was rushed to Jamaica Hospital and declared dead at 7:32 p.m., said the FDNY.

On Sunday, the victim's mother, Lorna Francis, who lives in Georgia, said she wished her son had just been left to harm himself. The police didn't even try and help her son, she said.

"He was a threat to himself, not to the police," she said. "He was not going to hurt anybody else."

Jackson's grandmother called 911 seeking medical help and take him to the hospital, Francis said.

"She thought they were coming with an ambulance, not thinking they were going to come and do that," she said. Instead, the police arrived, and quickly moved for their guns, said Francis, who was not present at the shooting. 

"They didn't even spend no time with him, they just got here, and they shot him," she said, basing her account on what Jackson's grandmother and cousin told her.

"I would feel much better if he had killed himself than if they killed him, without even giving him time. I know I would have cried, and have had to bury him, but I would know that he did that to himself, not by somebody that's supposed to help him."

"The last thing I heard from him was 'Mom, I love you,'" said Francis, who spoke to her son before the incident, as his relatives were trying to calm him down.

Relatives and friends gathered at the house Saturday, mourning Jackson's untimely death, a former landlord said.

"He was a nice young man, all of his neighbors will tell you," said the woman, who did not want her name used. "They could've tasered him, they could have held him down, they didn't need to kill him," he said. "He just had a two-week-old baby."

Francis said, contrary to news reports, that her son hadn't had a pscyhiatric history of problems, just that he had been depressed from being out of work,  was more upset now that he had his newborn son Landon, and was still jobless.

According to GreenLyteTV.com, Jackson had been a budding performer who went by the name Smokey Di Don, and was a member of a Rockaway-based group called MobbMobb.

The police officer was treated at North Manhasset Medical Center for tinnitus, police said. As of Sunday, the NYPD and no further information on the shooting, but said an investigation was ongoing.

Jackson's death was the second on Friday caused by a police officer, following the death of a bodega worker Reynaldo Cuevas, 20, who was fleeing a store during a robbery and shot by an officer accidentally, police said.