Good morning. It's Monday. Today we are looking at a shooting in Connecticut that killed two police officers. We will also look at a child care shortage in New York City, and how bureaucratic holdups are making some providers dip into their savings to pay their bills and staff. |
 | | Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times |
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Two officers were killed and a third wounded in Bristol, Conn., when officers responding to a 911 call last week faced a fusillade of bullets. |
The shooting left residents asking how such an attack could happen in a state with some of the tightest gun control laws in the country, my colleagues Corey Kilgannon, Jesse McKinley and Hurubie Meko wrote. This is the state where regulations were made even stricter after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre occurred in 2012, in a town some 40 minutes away. In Bristol, Nicholas Brutcher, 35, has been identified as the shooter; he was killed during the incident. |
In Connecticut, State Police officials said the incident may have been a trap, a "deliberate act to lure" officers to the home, my colleagues reported. And on Sunday, the state's Office of Inspector General released a preliminary report about circumstances of the deadly attack, as well as harrowing body-cam footage from the surviving officer. |
According to the inspector general, the three officers — Sgt. Dustin DeMonte, 35; Officer Alex Hamzy, 34; and Officer Alec Iurato — had approached a side door of Mr. Brutcher's house "based on a 911 call believed to have been made by Nicholas Brutcher." |
The three officers spoke to Mr. Brutcher's brother, Nathan, asking him to leave the house, before gunfire erupted from behind the officers; the inspector general said that Nicholas Brutcher fired more than 80 shots, killing Sergeant DeMonte and Officer Hamzy and striking Officer Iurato in the leg. |
"Shots fired, shots fired," Officer Iurato says. "More cars. Send everyone!" |
Despite his wounds, Officer Iurato was able to make his way back to a police department cruiser, something caught on his body cam, which also picked up a fusillade of gunfire, screaming and the officer's drawing his weapon. According to the inspector general, Officer Iurato fired one shot, killing Nicholas Brutcher, a use of deadly force that the inspector called "justified" on Sunday. |
Over the weekend, the Bristol police announced that Officer Iurato, 26, had been released from the hospital following surgery. |
On Friday, about three miles from the site of the attack, a steady stream of people carried bouquets of flowers to the Bristol Police Department, adding them to a display that included a police cruiser, photos of the fallen officers and a handmade sign with their names and badge numbers. By early evening, a crowd of several hundred had gathered for a candlelight vigil. |
"Our hearts go out to them," Linda Levesque, 75, said earlier in the day to my colleagues. "There was no need of this tragedy." |
Prepare for a chance of showers, with temperatures near the high 60s. At night, the chance of showers persists, with temps dropping into the high 40s. |
Suspended today (Shemini Atzereth) and tomorrow (Simhat Torah). |
 | | Dave Sanders for The New York Times |
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Funding crisis in day care |
 | | James Estrin/The New York Times |
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Yelena Shteyman, the director of Building Blocks, a preschool in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, has spent $50,000 of her own money running the new day care class she launched in September, a program intended to provide city-subsidized child care. But the city has failed to reimburse her because of a byzantine bureaucratic backlog that has meant her contract has not yet been registered, and thus her budget cannot be approved. |
Shteyman is not alone, my colleague Ginia Bellafante writes: A recent study found that by the end of the last fiscal year, 679 programs were owed more than $460 million. The situation threatens to exacerbate an already large problem in New York City: too few facilities to meet the demand for care for children under the age of 5, a third of whom qualify for subsided care. |
Following the success of universal pre-K, launched by the de Blasio administration, the City Council made strides toward universal child care on Wednesday: Legislation was passed to create an advisory board charged with coming up with a five-year plan to orchestrate universal care. |
But despite the progress in the Council, facilities that provide care are struggling. The city and its Department of Education have blamed the sluggishness on the system it inherited from the previous administration. Bellafante spoke to Lanny Cheuck, who runs a Montessori in Queens and who has invested $200,000 of her family's money to pay rent and her teachers' salaries as she waits for the city to compensate her. |
"I was crying to the D.O.E. yesterday, and it's embarrassing. I felt ashamed," Cheuck said. "I can't pay my teachers." |
It was a muggy August afternoon, and the skies were threatening as I hailed a cab to head uptown to make a pitch to a potential client. |
A torrential rain started just as I got in the cab and by the time we reached my destination on West 57th Street, the streets were flooded gutter to gutter. |
I stepped out of the cab gingerly only to have a cascade of rainwater sweep off my right shoe and propel it eastbound, never to be seen again. |
I didn't have time to buy another pair and the meeting was too important to cancel. So, with one shoe on and one shoe off, I hobbled into the elevator and rode up a dozen floors. |
When I got to the receptionist, I told her why I was only wearing one shoe. |
She pulled a pair of flip-flops from her gym bag. |
"Will these help?" she asked. |
It didn't matter that they were five sizes too small. I was grateful. I quickly slipped them on before being led into the conference room to make my presentation. |
I carried on as if everything were normal and no one said a word about my footwear. |
As I walked back to the reception area, I tried to decide what to do. Whatever it was — head for a shoe store or take a cab back to my office — I was going to be on a rainy Midtown street for at least a short time with just one shoe. |
I bent down to take off the flip-flops and return them to their owner. |
Glad we could get together here. James Barron is back tomorrow. — S.M.N. |
| Jesse McKinley, Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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