NYPD officer Jonathan Diller woke up on March 25 and told his wife he wanted to take their one-year-old son to the park.
In a tearful, 30-minute interview with The Post, his wife Stephanie recalled thinking, “There’s no way I’m missing out on a park day with the boys.”
They spent hours playing with little Ryan until Jon kissed her goodbye, and then he left for his night shift, patrolling the streets in Queens.
Later that day, the 31-year-old cop encountered a career criminal in a parked car in Far Rockaway. Guy Rivera, 34, with 21 arrests on his record, allegedly pulled out a pistol and opened fire, striking Diller in the stomach, just underneath his bulletproof vest.
Arriving home from a walk with Ryan, she got a call from a neighbor asking if she heard a cop was shot in Queens — sending Stephanie into a “spiral.”
“I started texting Jon, and he wasn’t answering, so I started to get worried.”
At around 6:30 pm, Stephanie getting a call from Jon’s former partner asked, “It’s Jon, isn’t it? How bad is it?”
“It’s really bad. I’m not gonna lie to you; they should be airlifting you here.”
An hour later, she was in a helicopter, taking her to Jamaica Hospital.
“I didn’t breathe, I think, the entire helicopter ride,” she remembered. Once at the hospital, “I just remember saying, ‘I don’t care what happened. I just want to know when I can see him. I just want to know how he is. I’ll find out what happened after, just tell me how he is.’ she recalled, crying.
Finally, the doctor came into the room, and “I knew Jonathan was dead.”
“I said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?” The doctor confirmed the worst, “He is.”
“I remember I just felt blank. I lost the love of my life, the father of my child, my best friend, my greatest advisor, my soulmate. And I just felt blank, like the whole future felt blank.”
But the worst feeling was driving back home alone. “Then I could literally feel my heart breaking,” she said. “Physically, I could feel my heart in my chest. I had chest pain. My heart was breaking because I had to leave him behind. It was just a reality: going home forever without you now.”
After the 2022 murders of Detective Jason Rivera and Detective Wilbert Mora, she remembered Jonathan saying, ‘I don’t want this to ever happen to you.’ Yet, barely over 2 years later, it did.
“In my eulogy, I asked how many officers have to die before we start protecting them. And I still stand by that….because I felt like that’s what Jonathan would say if he was here.”
But Democrats in NY’s one-party state have done nothing consequential to reform their no cash bail or raise the age laws. Please remember this young widow’s heart-wrenching words before voting for any pro-criminal, lawmaking Dem who has had a hand in these deadly miscarriages of justice.
And no matter how they try to spin it this fall, that would be all of them.
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