The gunman who fired at a cop in Queens as he returned home with his parents from a Broadway show has been busted, Chief of Detectives James Essig said Tuesday.
Michael Troutman, 44, was nabbed Sunday night in Franklin in western Pennsylvania.
A state trooper spotted a shotgun in Troutman’s father’s pulled-over minivan and identified the suspect after running the plates, according to Essig.
Troutman, also known as Douglas Slack and Michael Slack — the name the NYPD had earlier identified him by — was arrested at the scene and is being held pending an extradition hearing. Two other guns were found in the minivan, Essig said.
Troutman allegedly shot and wounded off-duty Officer Ivan Gomez the night of May 12 in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven on Queens Blvd. near 43rd St. in Sunnyside.
Gomez and his father were buying some items at the convenience store after seeing “MJ” on Broadway along with Gomez’s mother. They were getting back in the cop’s Jeep Renegade when the father saw the gunman sitting in the minivan and pointing his weapon toward the Jeep.
“I tried to close the door and I saw the guy,” the elder Gomez, 71, told The News the next day. “I saw the rifle in the window and I said, ‘Oh my God, this guy got the rifle.’ And — pow! pow!’
“I was shouting, and when I say that, the guy takes two shots. So I was in shock,” said the stunned father, who is counting his blessings and happy that everyone survived.
“I think that maybe God (intervened). (It was) not luck because if he moved the canon a little more back, he would have shot both,” he added.
The officer, assigned to the World Trade Center command, suffered minor injuries after hit was hit by broken glass from the shattered driver’s side window. Two days later, a doctor pulled a lead projectile out of his forearm. The cop’s mother, 70, was not hurt.
Essig said it wasn’t clear what brought Troutman to the city. He has arrests in Georgia for drug trafficking and for firing a…
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