Police Officer Shot in West Philly Sunday Night

iStockphoto.com | carlballou

Update:

Some additional information has to come to light about an incident that ended with a cop getting shot on Sunday.

According to law enforcement sources, the story began when three men robbed a man at 59th and Market streets, and stole the keys to the man’s Ford Expedition. The victim chased one of the suspects to the SEPTA Market-Frankford El station at 60th and Market and attacked the robber.

The two other thieves, meanwhile, walked to nearby Salford Street and tried to steal the victim’s SUV. They ended up getting into the wrong car — a Dodge Durango — by mistake. The woman who owned the Durango flagged down two Philly cops who were nearby. Things took a dramatic turn from there.

Earlier:

A Philadelphia police officer was shot in the leg at 59th and Market streets in West Philly on Sunday night.

Police Commissioner Richard Ross said Officer James McCullough and his partner were flagged down shortly before 9 p.m. by a woman at Salford and Market who told the cops two men were breaking into her car.

When the officers approached the men, they took off running. Ross said McCullough, 24, tackled one of the suspects and was “almost instantly shot in the left leg.” But the young cop kept on chasing after the suspects. He fired three shots, but didn’t strike either of the men.

McCullough was admitted to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in stable condition. The two suspects were apprehended.

The shooting unfolded in the same area where Officer Jesse Hartnett was shot and seriously injured by a self-proclaimed member of ISIS in early January. Both Hartnett and the officer who was wounded on Sunday were assigned to West Philly’s 18th District.

“This starts with two guys trying to commit a crime,” Ross said of the shooting that put McCullough in the hospital. “This is not about a police officer being targeted.”

SEPTA announced that the Market-Frankford El is was not making stops at the 60th Street station in the aftermath of the shooting.

The neighborhood has long been plagued by violence. In the final six of months of 2015, there were 13 shootings and 12 robberies in the area around 60th and Market streets.

This weekend proved to be particularly violent across the city; NBC-10 reported at least 10 people were shot, three of whom were killed, during one four-hour stretch. That grim tally doesn’t include the depressing fatal shooting of a 4-year-old girl in Kensington — at the hands of her father.

“It’s a dangerous city,” Mayor Jim Kenney said during a news conference Sunday night after McCullough was shot. “We have to get the guns off the street.”

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