BROOKLYN — NYPD Officer Gina Caridi was standing in a Brooklyn doorway on Mother’s Day trying to help a woman with a troubled 27-year-old son.
Suddenly, the son came rushing down a flight of stairs with an 11-inch dagger in his hand, heading straight toward Caridi.
“I immediately thought I was never going home to see my children, that I was going to be stabbed and die on Mother’s Day,” Caridi told DNAinfo New York's “On the Inside.”
A few hours earlier, Caridi, a nine-year veteran of the 63rd Precinct in Bergen Beach, was just another mother spending time with her three children — two sons and a daughter — eating breakfast, riding bikes, sharing quality time.
At around 3 p.m., as she was about to head out the door for a 4-to-midnight shift, her children handed her a small gift box that contained a necklace emblazoned with the words: “BEST MOM EVER."
“I never wear necklaces because they are uncomfortable with all my equipment,” said Caridi. “But it was Mother’s Day, and they had given it to me.”
About an hour into her tour, Caridi and her partner that day, Officer Michael Ellis, responded to a call of “an emotionally disturbed man kicking and banging parked cars” on Avenue T, where they were met by two other officers, Ruben Dry and Joseph Coon.
Witnesses told them the suspect, Simon Zemshman, who had multiple arrests for robbery, assault and larceny, had gone into his home.
The four officers knocked on Zemshman’s front door. His mother pulled the drapes from a second-floor window and motioned she was coming down to let them in.
“Does anyone here need an ambulance?” one of the officers asked her.
“Yes. My son,” she replied.
Caridi said she could not help but feel badly for another mother who needed help from the police on Mother’s Day. But as quickly as that thought emerged, so did Zemshman, who came running down the stairs at full speed with the dagger in his hand.
“I saw a figure charging down the stairs and I yelled out, ‘There’s something in his hand’ and before I could even visualize what it was, he came flying out of the house like lightning speed,” Caridi said.
She instinctively tried to “retreat to get some distance between us,” but she lost her balance, fell onto her back with Zemshman standing above her with the dagger, which was replica from the 1994 film “The Shadow” starring Alec Baldwin, raised above his head.
“I thought I was going to be stabbed, that this is it,” Caridi said. “I am not going home to my children, and it’s Mother’s Day.”
Dry yelled “Drop the knife,” and then managed to squeeze off a shot, which missed, Caridi said. Zemshman then turned and headed at Dry, who issued another warning and fired, this time hitting Zemshman in the stomach.
Zemshman’s family came outside asking why the police shot Simon. The officers pointed to the knife.
Zemshman had a collection of knives in his room, and there was another knife on him when he was shot, Caridi recalled the family saying.
“I felt for the mother,” Caridi said.
She recalled telling his mother to get some towels that Caridi used to put pressure on Zemshman’s wound. The move may have saved his life, officials later said.
“I was hoping to help put her at ease,” Caridi, a former lifeguard from a family of police and firefighters, continued.
Zemshman was taken to a hospital and then transferred to a medical facility on Rikers Island, Department of Correction records show. He's facing attempted murder and assault charges, prosecutors said.
Caridi, meanwhile, followed the ambulance to the hospital, where she was treated for her bruises from the scuffle.
By 5 a.m. the following morning, Caridi finally made it back home to her husband, Daniel, a city firefighter, and their children.
“I just could not wait to get home to my children and give them big hugs and kisses,” she said.
She caught an hour of sleep, and got up “to get my children ready for school,” she said.
“I gave them even bigger-than-usual hugs and kisses, and told them to have a good day,” she added.
And she never told them why.
