Why didn't the cops use restraint instead of killing him? Huh?
A hatchet-swinging man with Islamic militant leanings turned a busy Queens street corner into a scene of bloody chaos Thursday, chopping a rookie cop in the back of the head and slicing a second officer on the arm before two other officers shot him dead.
In opening fire on the madman, cops accidentally wounded a bystander, authorities said.
Officer Kenneth Healey, 25, had just four months on the job when Zale Thompson, 32, of Queens — a “scholarly” but “weird” recent convert to Islam — fractured the back of the cop’s skull with one swing of a blue-handled hatchet at about 2 p.m. in Jamaica.
A 29-year-old woman walking a half-block away was struck in the back by a stray police bullet and was in stable condition, according to police sources.
The NYPD is investigating whether Islamic extremism played a role in the attack, which left the rookie in serious but stable condition Thursday night.
“Helicopters, big military will be useless on their own soil,” Thompson raged in a private Facebook post, Fox News reported.
“They will not be able to defeat our people if we use guerilla warfare. Attack their weak flanks,” he added.
“There’s nothing we know at this time that would indicate that [Islamic terrorism] is the case,” Police Commissioner William Bratton said at a press conference at Jamaica Hospital.
“That’s what the investigation will attempt to determine,” Bratton said as Healey, the son of a 34-year Nassau County police detective, underwent surgery.
The second injured cop, Officer Joseph Meeker, also a four-month rookie, was “conscious and alert” at Jamaica Hospital, police said.
Video shows Thompson pulling the hatchet from a bag, then taking a running leap at Healey and his three companions as they stood together on the rainy sidewalk.
Holding the hatchet in two hands like a baseball bat, he swung three times, one source who saw the video told The Post.
The first swing broke the one cop’s arm. The second was a miss. The third struck Healey in the back of the head.
“The cops yelled, ‘Drop it!’ ” recalled eyewitness Larry Bethune, 44, who watched the violence unspool at Jamaica Avenue and 160th Street.
“He raised his arm up high and brought it straight down on the cop’s head,” the Hollis resident added.
“The cop went down to the ground face-first . . . The cop’s just lying there with blood pouring down his face. He didn’t move.”
Another witness, Kelli Reddica, 24, recalled hearing seven police bullets ring out as Thompson was taken down — and seeing the young cop’s horrible head injury.
“He looked like he couldn’t move, and blood was gushing out of his head,” Reddica said of Healey. “Blood just drenched the side of his face,” she said.
Thompson is being investigated for broader terrorist connections, a law enforcement source said, adding, “There are suspected terror ties.”
Thompson’s Facebook page includes a passage from the Quran in Arabic script beseeching Allah’s guidance in finding “the straight path” and a black-and-white photograph of a black-scarved militant.
Thompson was a “very educated” proponent of “black power” and a graduate of the College of New Rochelle in Harlem, said a classmate who asked not to be identified by name.
