Bleeding from nine bullet wounds, a brave cop waved off the officers coming to his rescue and sent them to tend to the wounded inside a besieged Wisconsin temple where a neo-Nazi had just gunned down six worshipers.
That tough cop turned out to be a New Yorker.
Word of Lt. Brian Murphy’s bravery — and his big city roots — emerged Monday, but it was no surprise to his Brooklyn dad James Murphy, whose other son, Terry, just retired from the NYPD Intelligence Division.
“I raised two brave guys,” said Murphy, 78, a retired city sanitation worker.
The cop’s composure and bravery didn’t shock fellow officers at the Oak Creek, Wis., police department, either. They said Brian Murphy still has his New York chutzpah — and accent — even though he’s worked in suburban Milwaukee for more than two decades.
“He’s a highly distinguished police officer, highly decorated,” Thomas Bauer, the town’s former police chief, told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Murphy, 51, was in critical condition Monday and expected to survive. But a bullet is still lodged in his neck — and he may have suffered some permanent damage.
“Brian can’t talk because that bullet is in a sensitive spot,” his dad said. “He’s not out of the woods yet.”
He said if anyone could pull through, it’s Brian.
“He could walk through walls, that guy,” the senior Murphy said. “It’s terrible he had to take all those bullets, but he was helping people who were in real trouble.”
The celebration of Murphy’s heroism came a day after the nation was stunned by another senseless mass slaughter.
This time, the killer was not a Batman-obsessed loner but a 40-year-old bigot who for reasons still unclear targeted innocent followers of the Sikh religion.
His stepmother, Laura Page, told The Denver Post she was in “total shock.” The Texas woman said his real mom died when he was young, but that he was raised in “a family full of joy and love.”
“We did the normal things that families do,” she said.
ABC News reported Monday that Page was associated with the white-supremacist group Volksfront. But the organization issued a statement denying the report and disavowing Page and his “demented criminal cowardice.”
The FBI believes Page was the lone shooter.
