Hundreds of detectives from the Long Island county and the city pursued fugitive ex-con Darrell Fuller after the carnage — and the wounded suspect was busted in his St. Albans neighborhood, authorities said.
Cops nabbed a cold-blooded killer who gunned down a Nassau County cop Tuesday morning and then slayed a random stranger in a highway carjacking in Queens.
Hundreds of detectives from the Long Island county and the city pursued fugitive ex-con Darrell Fuller after the carnage — and the wounded suspect was busted in his St. Albans neighborhood, authorities said.
Officer Arthur Lopez, 29, was shot on Jamaica Ave. near the Belmont Park racetrack after a short car chase that followed a hit-and-run accident on Northern Blvd. in Bellerose Terrace, L.I., police said.
The driver of the fleeing silver Honda — which was running on its rims — zipped onto the Cross Island Parkway before exiting on Jamaica Ave., cops said.
Lopez and his partner hit the lights on their vehicle at about 11 a.m. as the car turned onto 241st St., cops said.
Lopez approached the car and had a brief conversation in broad daylight with suspect Fuller, 33, before the gunman fatally shot the officer in the chest and sped off, cops said.
“The officer’s just walking up to the car,” eyewitness Paul Walcott said. “They just pulled out (a gun) and shot. He went right down … He went straight down.”
The officer was not wearing a bulletproof vest. The eight-year veteran died at North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital.
“He leaves grieving parents … you should hear the screams of his mother,” said Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano. “He lost his life to a cold-blooded murderer.”
As the dying officer’s partner tended to him, the armed suspect drove back onto the Cross Island Parkway and apparently forced another vehicle off the road.
That driver had been speaking with his daughter on the phone when Fuller approached and shot him once in the head from point-blank range, officials and friends said.
“(The victim) was talking to his daughter on the phone,” said Flynn Brown, who lent the victim her car. “He said, ‘Someone is chasing me,’ and that’s the last thing she heard.”
The double-murder suspect then jumped into the dead man’s car and sped off, only to abandon it a short distance away and take off on foot.
Cops said Fuller, of Queens, shed a grey hoodie as he sprinted away from the stolen vehicle. The double-murder suspect did five years for a 2004 attempted murder conviction, and was later arrested for violating his parole.
His most recent arrest was in March 2010 for criminal possession of a controlled substance in Nassau County.
