Paralysed NYPD officer who forgave teenage attacker dies aged 59

Detective Steven McDonald, the New York City police officer who was paralysed after being shot in the line of duty and famously forgave his teenage assailant, has died.

He was 59 years of age when he passed away on Tuesday.

A New York police spokesman confirmed that McDonald, who was Catholic, had died at a Long Island hospital four days after suffering a heart attack.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York called McDonald “a prophet, without speaking, of the pro-life cause.”

“He showed us,” the cardinal said, “that the value of life doesn’t depend on physical ability, but on one’s heart and soul, both of which he had in abundance.”

The cardinal told Catholic New York, newspaper of the New York Archdiocese, that he had visited McDonald in the hospital’s intensive care unit and said that the many rosaries and religious statues there represented outward signs of a Catholic faith the detective dearly practised.

“You could see that he was such a fervent Catholic,” Cardinal Dolan said.

McDonald often discussed his Catholic faith and the reason he forgave the teenage shooter, explaining that he believed what happened to him was God’s will and that he was meant to become a messenger for God’s message of peace, forgiveness and reconciliation in the world.

While on patrol on July 12, 1986, McDonald came upon three teenagers in Central Park and stopped to frisk them because he thought one of them had a weapon in his sock.

Read more at Catholic Herald.