Shooting Haunted His Life

By JOHN MARZULLI
Daily News Staff Writer

They found him slumped in his parked car on an Islip, L.I., street — a suicide, an ex-cop who took an overdose of pills.

His name was Salvatore Glibbery. He once had been a decorated officer with perfect attendance and a bright future, but his life changed in the time it took to pull a trigger.

He and his partner shot and killed a knife-wielding man on a wintry Queens night in 1987, an incident that sparked outrage and plunged Glibbery into a paralyzing depression that would not end. His emotional descent took him through the counseling system the Police Department has set up to help troubled cops and ended with his quiet death at age 40 on a suburban street.

	Police Officer Salvatore Glibbery

"He did his job, and he was never recognized," said his father, Thomas Glibbery. "That's what ate his poor mind away."

Glibbery's family thinks the NYPD's of his request for a three-quarter-salary pension — despite expert findings that he suffered posttraumatic stress disorder — drove him to suicide. Now, his wife and three children hold onto a slim hope he'll get the pension posthumously.

The officer's turmoil was chillingly recorded in an NYPD psychiatric report obtained by the Daily News. It provides a rare inside glimpse of a haunted cop wrestling with a death he caused and a department that seemed unable to help him.

"He felt bad about what he had done, and he needed someone to tell him that he had done the right thing," said Nancy Glibbery, his widow.

It was an icy 25 degrees about 7 p.m. on Dec. 29, 1987, when Salvatore Glibbery and Officer Peter Tannazzo — both white — confronted Alfred Sanders, who was black, on a Laurelton street. They'd been called to 134th Road by Sanders' ex-girlfriend, who said he had threatened her, uprooted a mailbox and screamed he was going to kill himself.

Sanders was waving a 5-inch knife, and when he lunged at the cops, Glibbery and Tannazzo killed him with 11 shots.

Salvatore Glibbery (2nd from l.) at baptism of son Steven (c.) with Salvatore Jr. (l.), wife, Nancy (2nd from r.), daughter Christina (r.) about 3 years ago.

The next day, the shooting became a lightning rod for outrage and intense media scrutiny. The Rev. Al Sharpton called it "the most brutal police killing I've ever heard of." The two cops got little support from the department: then-Commissioner Benjamin Ward said they should have shown more "prudence."

Police brass told Glibbery not to seek a commendation medal for the incident because it was too controversial.

A Queens jury vindicated the pair, saying they had acted properly, but for Glibbery, an ex-Marine who had joined the department in 1983, it wasn't enough. He started to slip.

The shooting, he told a police counselor, "changed everything," according to the psychiatric report. The cop became obsessed about what happened, he would later say, and grew terrified at the prospect of having to use his gun again.

He initially kept his feelings private, he said, getting help from the union to obtain a nonpatrol assignment.

He held it until 1994, when he was ordered back onto the street and assigned to the 100th Precinct in Rockaway, Queens. His depression turned to terror.

"On the way to work, in tears, he would sometimes close his eyes while driving, testing how long he could go without opening them," police psychologist Alice Steiner wrote. "He hoped to hit a pole, but would open them after a few seconds, worried about the possibility of hitting a family instead of killing himself."

Glibbery lasted eight weeks at the 100th. During one call, he froze, trancelike, with his pistol drawn. Soon after, he surrendered his guns.

"I'm nothing anymore," he told his father. He revealed the depth of his depression — and his terrible dreams — to Steiner.

"A lot of the nightmares were him reliving the shooting again," Nancy Glibbery said. "And he would dream of being on patrol with no clothes, naked. That's how he felt, stripped of everything."

Glibbery was prescribed Prozac and sleeping pills, but his anxiety worsened, according to the reports. He retired in 1997 on an ordinary disability pension and filed for a line-of-duty designation. The line-of-duty pension "would give him the recognition for being a good cop, for being involved in a fatal shooting that caused him suffering till the day he died," said his attorney Jeffrey Goldberg. Three private psychologists and Steiner found that he suffered posttraumatic stress disorder as a result of the shooting.

But the police medical board — a psychiatrist, an orthopedist and a general practitioner — disagreed.

"What appeared to be the core of his obsessive ruminations was not the trauma of the shooting incident, but the strong feelings of inadequacy that pain him," they ruled June 14.

Sources said it is rare — but not unheard of — for the NYPD to award tax-free disability pensions for a psychological disorder.

On July 7, Suffolk County cops found Glibbery unconscious in the front seat of his car. There was no note.

	Nancy Glibbery

It's thought he swallowed an overdose of sleeping and anti-depressant pills he had been hoarding. Next week, the full pension board will have a last chance to award Glibbery the line-of-duty designation posthumously.

If he doesn't get it, the $1,300 Nancy Glibbery receives each month will stop in 2007. The family's medical coverage ended with his death.

As for Tannazzo, his career continued. He now works as a narcotics detective in Queens. The Sanders family reportedly settled a civil suit against the city.

"Everybody got taken care of, except my son," Thomas Glibbery said.

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