NYPD officer who shot, paralyzed Indian-origin stranger was ‘time bomb,’ lawsuit says

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For years before Hieu Tran allegedly shot a motorist in the head, the New York police officer had struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder leading to alcohol abuse, according to a lawsuit. Tran’s commanding officer told him to seek treatment, but Tran did not, the lawsuit alleged, and the NYPD did not take further action.

In May, an off-duty Tran is alleged to have used his service weapon to shoot Kishan Patel, a New Jersey shopkeeper, when he pulled up next to Patel’s vehicle at a New Jersey intersection.

Tran, 27, was charged in June with attempted murder for the incident, which left Patel paralyzed from the neck down with a traumatic brain injury. Last week, Patel’s family brought its own court case, accusing the NYPD of enabling an avoidable tragedy by failing to address Tran’s issues or discipline the troubled officer.

The federal lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York names Tran, the city of New York, Mayor Eric Adams and former NYPD commissioner Edward Caban and seeks damages to cover the costs of Patel’s medical expenses.

“It’s just unimaginable,” Dan Gaughan, Patel’s brother in law, told The Washington Post. “This could have been fully avoided if proper precautions were taken by [Tran’s] superiors.”

The NYPD and Adams’s office declined to comment. An attorney in Tran’s criminal case did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Patel, 30, was returning home from work on the evening of May 17 and stopped at a red light in Voorhees Township, N.J., when Tran pulled up next to him, according to court documents. Surveillance footage shows Patel’s pickup truck speed uncontrollably through the intersection, striking another vehicle, and Tran’s vehicle speeding through the intersection shortly afterward.

Police responding to the collision found Patel unresponsive in his truck with a gunshot wound behind his right ear. He was diagnosed with an anoxic brain injury and spinal cord injury, according to the lawsuit, and an occupant of the vehicle Patel crashed into also suffered a life-threatening injury.

Tran did not report the incident and returned to work in New York, according to the lawsuit. Using surveillance footage and cellphone data, investigators determined that Tran was the sole occupant of his vehicle at the time of the shooting and linked three 9mm shell casings from the scene to his service weapon, court documents from the criminal case state. He was arrested in June.

Camden County authorities initially described the incident as an apparent act of road rage. Tran and Patel did not know each other, and Tran pulled up next to Patel only briefly before the shooting occurred, according to court documents.

But in a pretrial detention hearing, an attorney for Tran said that a psychological evaluation found he had struggled with work-related PTSD, a depressive disorder and alcohol abuse for years before the shooting, and that his superiors were aware of his alcohol abuse, according to criminal court records cited in Patel’s lawsuit.

Prosecutors described Tran as a “time bomb.”

“It seems inevitable that something tragic was impending in his life based upon his physical, psychological and emotional deterioration,” Tran’s psychological evaluation stated, according to court records.

The lawsuit filed by Patel’s family alleged that Tran was known to the NYPD as a “problem officer” even before the incident and was transferred to the Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information, the police department’s media team, but not suspended or required to surrender his service weapon.

Tran was suspended without pay upon his arrest, ABC7 reported. The NYPD did not respond to an inquiry about his current status in the department.

“Hieu Tran is just a byproduct of a malfunctioning, dysfunctioning police department, the biggest police department in the country,” said Joseph Marrone, an attorney for Patel’s family. “Their incompetence, they allowed this to happen, and they should be held accountable.”

Patel is paralyzed from the neck down, has been nonverbal since the shooting and requires constant medical care, his family and attorney said. He was recently engaged to his partner and had been planning to take over his family’s businesses – two liquor stores and a pool and janitorial supply store – from his parents, who were nearing retirement age.

“This is an innocent young man with a beautiful life ahead of him, just on his way home from work,” Gaughan said. “Our main focus is just to do whatever it takes to get him back.”

Patel’s family has shouldered the cost of his medical treatment out of pocket, Marrone said. He added that the overall cost the family has borne, between expenses for medical care that Patel may need for the rest of his life and lost income from the family business, exceed hundreds of millions of dollars.

Tran remains detained pending trial in his criminal case, Marrone said.