Convinced he was going to jail for ordering the fatal Tasering of a deranged man, a depressed police lieutenant wrote a wrenching farewell note to his wife and three kids. "I'm sorry for the mess!!" Lt. Michael Pigott scrawled on a desperate day in October 2008. "I was trying to protect my guys that day!"
Pigott, who was assigned to the elite Emergency Service Unit, took responsibility for giving the order that doomed the disturbed man. He closed with these words: "I can't bear to lose my family and go to jail."
A short time later, Pigott pumped a bullet into his head.
It was his 46th birthday.
Pigott's widow unveiled her husband's gut-wrenching suicide note for the first time Monday and announced she was suing the police brass who "smeared" a good man.
"They didn't ever ask him for his side of the story," Susan Pigott said. "They took his job from him. They ripped his heart out. They took his life."
Susan Pigott said her husband "was a dedicated police officer doing his job that day."
She said she had no idea he was contemplating suicide when he told her, "My life is on the line. My job is on the line. What's going to happen to me?"
Breaking down in tears, Pigott called her husband "a good man" and a good father to their three kids, Robert, 16. Michael, 14. Elizabeth, 11.
Pigott killed himself eight days after he ordered Officer Nicholas Marchesona to fire a stun gun at 35-year-old Iman Morales of Brooklyn.
A former mental patient, Morales was naked and raving and flailing at cops with a fluorescent light bulb when he was shocked. He fell from a ledge to his death.
Pigott, a 21-year police veteran, was stripped of his gun and badge and placed on desk duty after the fatal confrontation in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
"He was so upset when they told him he could go to jail and they took his badge away and took his gun," said Susan Pigott, of Sayville, L.I. "He was no longer a police officer."
In the early hours of Oct. 2, 2008, Pigott made his way to the locker room of ESU's Brooklyn headquarters, broke into another cop's locker, and removed a 9 mm handgun, police said.
Pigott was found dead at 6 a.m. that day in Floyd Bennett Field, police said.
The family's lawyer said the NYPD pushed the lieutenant over the edge.
"They made him believe he was going to be prosecuted and that he would be responsible for any judgment in a civil suit," lawyer Rodney Lapidus said.
"They smeared this man's reputation and instead of backing him up they threw him to the wolves."
Lapidus also accused Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne, and other unnamed police officials of lying to reporters about the contents of the suicide note.
The NYPD declined comment.
In February, Morales' family sued Lt. Pigott's estate, Marchesona, the city and the NYPD for damages. They also questioned why the Brooklyn district attorney's office failed to investigate.
A lawyer for the Morales family declined comment.
Shortly after Pigott's suicide, the Daily News, in an editorial called "Thrown to the Wolves," lamented Lt. Pigott's death.
"Pigott lived in a different kind of place, a place that allows no margin of error for cops and stands ready to flay even good ones," the editorial said.
Poster Comment:
Tasered a man on a ledge? What did he think was going to happen?
