Jonathan Diller’s final hours were filled with joy.
A lucky NYPD officer who had been working countless overtime shifts at the 105th Precinct in Queens woke up on the morning of March 25 and told his wife that he wanted to take their 1-year-old son to the park to give her some much-needed rest.
But she didn’t accept it.
“I was like, ‘I can’t miss my day at the park with my boys. Don’t leave me behind,'” the 29-year-old tearfully recalled in a 30-minute interview with The Washington Post.
So the couple, bathed in the early spring sunshine, set off from their Massapequa Park home on Long Island to Marjorie Post Park, baby in tow.
They stayed there playing with little Ryan for hours before John kissed her goodbye and left for his night shift with the NYPD’s Community Response Team in his patrol district of Queens South.
It was the young family’s last time together.
At 5:50 p.m. that day, a 31-year-old police officer encountered a repeat offender in a parked car in Far Rockaway. Suspect Guy Rivera, 34, a man with 21 prior arrests, allegedly pulled out a handgun and fired, striking Diller in the abdomen, just below his bulletproof vest.
With one bullet, the family’s future was gone.
The three-year NYPD veteran called Stephanie early in the shift and, while walking Ryan around the neighborhood, suggested he skip lunch and meet up for dinner later.
When she returned home from a walk, she felt a “weird feeling” in her stomach.
Later, a neighbor called and asked if she had heard about the police shooting in Queens, leaving Stephanie “confused.”
“I started texting John and he wasn’t responding so I started to get worried,” the widow recalled.
When she tracked his cell phone, “I found out he was in the hospital.”
Around 6:30 pm, Stephanie received a call from her husband’s ex-partner.
“John, right?” she asked quickly.
“How bad is it?”
“It’s really bad,” he replied.
“I’m not gonna lie to you. They’re going to fly you here.”
Her house began to fill with visitors.
“Ryan was scared, so I was holding him,” she tearfully recalled.
An hour later, she was rushed to McKenna Elementary School, then loaded onto a helicopter and flown to Jamaica Hospital.
“I don’t think I was breathing the whole time I was in the helicopter,” she recalled.
“The officer with me said, ‘Stephanie, you need to breathe. I’ve never seen you breathe.’
When she arrived at the hospital, “I remember just saying, ‘I don’t care what happened. I just want to know when I’ll see him. I just want to know how he’s doing. I’ll find out what happened later, just tell me how he’s doing,'” she recalled, crying.
During the surgery, after what seemed like an endless wait, my husband’s doctor came into the room.
“Being a nurse myself, I knew the moment they said, ‘Please sit down,’ that Jonathan had passed away,” she told The Post.
“I said, ‘Isn’t he dead?’ The doctor confirmed the worst: ‘He’s dead.'”
“I remember just feeling empty. I had lost the love of my life, the father of my children, my best friend, my greatest advisor, my soul mate, and just felt empty, like my entire future had been emptied.”
But the worst part of all was when she had to drive back to her house without him.
“At that moment, I literally felt my heart break,” she said.
“Physically, I could feel my heart in my chest. My chest hurt. My heart was breaking because I had to leave him behind. It was real now that I was going home without you forever.”
She couldn’t sleep that night.
Instead, Diller watched the clock, counting down the minutes until her husband was supposed to get home.
“That’s when he comes in,” she said.
“At this time, he should be here even if he is late.”
Looking to the future, she wants her son, who she jokingly calls “Wreck-It Ryan” because of his mischievous behavior, to get to know his dad better.
“He’s still so young, he doesn’t have the memories that I do,” she said.
“I think he’s the one who’s suffering the most.”
