Read the NYPD Trial Judge's Decision to Fire the Cop Who Killed Allan Feliz—That Commissioner Tisch Just Tossed

NYPD Lieutenant Jonathan Rivera, the officer who killed Allan Feliz by shooting him point-blank in the chest during a traffic stop in 2019, likely pulled the trigger because he was "tired" of fighting with him, and then gave "self-serving statements fabricated to minimize his culpability" after the fact.

These were the findings of NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemarie Maldonado, who determined back in February in Rivera's departmental trial that he should be fired for killing Feliz.

But last week, the day before a holiday weekend, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch brushed Maldonado's ruling aside, declining to fire Rivera and instead keeping him on the force.

"I do not think anyone can make assumptions about [Rivera's] state of mind in the aftermath of the shooting," Tisch wrote in a missive explaining her rationale for overruling the NYPD's top judge, which borrowed heavily from Attorney General Letitia James's decision to not press criminal charges, "let alone assumptions about what he should have said or done."

Yet as Deputy Commissioner Maldonado pointed out in her decision, which Hell Gate obtained and is publishing in full below, it is quite literally Maldonado's job to weigh what happened before, during, and after chaotic, disputed events that involve members of the public and NYPD officers who are supposed to be held to the highest standard of integrity. And she determined that Rivera did not have a justifiable reason to shoot Feliz, and that he then gave "contrived" testimony to cover it up.