Ex-Detective and Domestic Violence Survivor Tells Story of Rise in NYPD
By Leonard Greene
Source New York Daily News (TNS)
- Retired NYPD Detective Katrina Brownlee was once shot 10 times, and miraculously survived after nearly bleeding to death.
- She was five months pregnant and wasn't yet an officer. The shooter was an abusive boyfriend, the father of her child, who had a gun because he was a law enforcement officer.
- Brownlee details her struggle and triumph in a new book, “And Then Came the Blues: My Story of Survival on Both Sides of the Badge,” which hits bookshelves next month.
NEW YORK -- Retired NYPD Detective Katrina Brownlee was once shot 10 times, and miraculously survived after nearly bleeding to death.
It didn’t happen in the line of duty. The victim, five months pregnant, wasn’t even a cop yet. The shooter was an abusive boyfriend, the father of her child, who had a gun because he was a law enforcement officer.
Despite what she and prosecutors said were desperate 911 calls in the months leading up to the 1993 shooting, police officers who responded to their Long Island home failed to protect her. Instead they shielded her abuser, a New York City correction officer, after one look at his badge, Brownlee and her advocates said.
Brownlee said she felt betrayed, by him and by the system. But instead of letting it get her down any further, she used the experience to become the kind of law enforcement officer she said she was never fortunate enough to have when she needed one the most.
“At any step along the way, I might have given up and decided, the world owes me, not the other way around,” Brownlee would write years later. “But I knew if I could protect even a few people from the pain I had suffered, I would be a better person for it.”
Brownlee details her struggle and triumph in a new book, “And Then Came the Blues: My Story of Survival on Both Sides of the Badge,” which hits book shelves next month.
Brownlee, a motivational speaker, has told her story before, but never to as wide an audience as she can reach with her own memoir.
And, like her book, her life has chapters.There’s the troubled childhood chapter, the 18-year-old struggling single mom chapter, the dashing civil servant who whisks her away from the projects chapter and the abusive boyfriend/fiance who turns on her and nearly ends her life chapter.
But that’s not where Brownlee’s story ends. That’s actually where it begins.
Her abuser, Alex Irvin, pleaded guilty and served 10 years in prison. Brownlee’s unborn child did not survive, but she learned to walk again.
After a stint writing tickets as a New York City traffic agent, Brownlee decided she wanted to do more. She wanted to be a cop.
“Katrina and I actually talked about why she would join the police department. And one of the things she mentioned [was] the best way to change a system is from the inside out,” Keri Herzog, the Suffolk County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Irvin, told CBS News.
“A system that Katrina says repeatedly turned its back on her when she’d call 911 after being beaten in the years before she was shot. Katrina wanted to become what she says she needed all those years ago: A good cop.”
Brownlee graduated from the police academy in 2001.
“I felt like my entire life was playing at high speed on a movie screen inside my head,” Brownlee writes in the book.
“The idea that a girl like me-from the projects, abused and abandoned, who was raised by an alcoholic grandmother and lived with a crackhead aunt, who was a recovering drug addict and a high school dropout, who was shot and left for dead, who was homeless and hungry and mistreated every which way could have actually made it as far as I had just couldn’t be real.”
But it was. And it got even better.
Not only was Brownlee a good cop. She was a great cop, catching on quickly with empathy and compassion every step of the way.
Brownlee rose through the ranks, working undercover with the narcotics division before transferring to vice. She served in the NYPD for 20 years, rising to First Grade Detective.
Her last assignment was serving in the Executive Protection Detail under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, one of the highest honors for an NYPD officer.
She retired in 2021.
The most remarkable part about Brownlee’s journey was that she managed to go 20 years as a police officer without telling anyone in the department about the pain that drove her.
But on her last day on the job, she sat down with de Blasio for an exit interview, and opened up about her past.
“I was shot 10 times by my ex-fiancé, and I was paralyzed,” she told the mayor.
“He didn’t speak for a long time. Finally, he asked me, ‘Why didn’t you ever say anything?’”
“There are some things you just can’t say,” she replied.
Well, she’s saying it all now. And the rest of us should listen.
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