Suspect who opened fired in Staten Island is shot at NYPD officer

A charge of attempted murder is back in play against a defendant in a shots-fired incident last month in Clifton involving multiple suspects and a police officer.

Raymond Jackson, 29, was arrested April 16 after what law-enforcement officials described as a gunfight between multiple suspects in the confines of the Park Hill Apartments complex that culminated with an officer firing his weapon. Authorities say Jackson fired a gun at an unidentified civilian, and that video shows a gun in his right hand. Jackson lives in the vicinity of the incident.

The officer fired to “prevent more harm” toward himself or others, prosecutors alleged at the defendant’s first court appearance in the case.

Early reports alleged the defendant had possibly raised a firearm toward the officer. But an attempted murder charge was removed from the docket at the defendant’s April 19 arraignment in Criminal Court, St. George. The top charge in the case at the time was criminal possession of a weapon.

Since then, the defendant has been indicted in state Supreme Court, St. George, for those charges, in addition to a separate indictment surrounding the same incident that includes attempted murder and reckless endangerment charges. The alleged target of the attempted murder in the second indictment is unclear in court documents.

Attorneys for Jackson — a persistent felon who at the time was working a demolition job — have argued he was being shot at from one or more unidentified adversaries, at which point he saw responding officers and ran toward them for help when he instead was met with gunfire. Somehow, no one was shot in the harrowing ordeal that played out on an unseasonably warm Sunday within distance of innocent bystanders.

There are two unapprehended individuals in the case, sources said.