Greenwich Village Shootings: Human-Interest Follow-Up

The younger officer, Yevgeniy Marshalik, 19, whose Russian family fled the war in Chechnya when he was a young boy, was a star member of his high school debating team who would go back to his New York University dorm to tell his classmates tales of the streets.

The other man, Nicholas T. Pekearo, was nine years older, but in a way, more the boy — a crime and comic-book buff, blessed with a vivid imagination and a morbid curiosity, who longed to write his own noir novels, his friends said.

His death could have been a dark ending to one of his own stories. Mr. Pekearo, a salesman at a small bookstore on the Upper East Side, had saved up to buy his own bulletproof vest — the department does not provide them to auxiliary officers .He was wearing it Wednesday night when a gunman killed him with six shots in the torso and shoulder at point-blank range on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village.