A police officer stabbed in the skull while responding to a 911 call "has a shot at a full recovery," according to his doctor, because the knife blade narrowly missed vital brain functions.
NYPD officer Eder Loor, 28, was stabbed in the face and neck and had bleeding on the brain when he arrived at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan Tuesday afternoon, officials told NBC New York.
Dr. Joshua Bederson, professor and chair of neurosurgery at the hospital, said Loor would be uncomfortable for a while and would have low energy, but said "my guess is that within a month he'll be bugging me about getting back to work."
Overall, he said, Loor is "as lucky as you get." The knife, he said, went deep into Loor's temporal lobe and nicked an artery that, if it had been cut, likely would have killed him.
The New York Times reported that the folding knife’s three-inch blade passed half an inch below structures that control motor functions and another half-inch from structures that control vision. It touched the nerve that gives sensation to the face and nicked, but did not penetrate, a major artery.
“It was a millimeter (0.04 of an inch) from everything; it was ridiculous,” Bederson told the New York Times. “You don’t want to overemphasize, but he was at death’s door. He was minutes away from crashing.”
Read the fully story at NBC New York
Loor's pregnant wife, Dina, said her husband loves his job and will surely want to return to it.
"This is his passion, this is what he's lived for ... he doesn't quit ... he wants more and more in life," she told NBC New York.
Loor had been responding to a 911 call in East Harlem by the suspect's mother, who had called police saying her son needed to go to a hospital because he was "acting in an erratic manner."
The suspect, Terrence Hale, has several previous arrests, one for assault with a knife, officials said. A law enforcement official said police officers had been called several times to the home where he lives with his mother.
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The officers were escorting him out of the apartment building when he suddenly produced a knife and began stabbing Loor. He fled but was caught two blocks away.
He was undergoing a psych evaluation at Metropolitan Hospital. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney.
Dina Loor, 25, told the New York Times that she had brought their four-and-a-half-year-old daughter into her husband’s room for a bedside visit. The girl was happy “to see her dad,” Loor said.
Their next child, a boy, is due in July, the newspaper said.
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