Young NYPD cop meets officers who saved her, mom, brother in 1996 East Harlem car fire

NYPD officer ​Dennise Gomez didn’t think twice when she was asked at the Police Academy why she wanted to be a cop.

When she was two years old, she recounted, two officers in East Harlem saved her, her ​year-old brother and ​their mom from a burning car.

Gomez, now 29, on Friday met those cops — Eric Ocasio and Charles Claudio, who both retired as detectives — for the first time since that fateful ​rescue, which was immortalized in a 1996 Daily News story.

​​”​All ​I had was the n​ewsp​aper article​,” Gomez said during an emotional reunion at One Police Plaza. ​”That’s what my mom showed to me.

​”The art​icle was ver​y emotional — very motiv​ational for me to go ahead and say, ‘I want to do what they did for me.’”

The reunion, she said, made her abstract opinion of the officers — she considered them superheroes — tangible and overwhelming.

“I was like, ‘Wow. Now they’re real,” said Gomez, who joined the NYPD in July 2022.

The icing on the cake: Gomez on Friday was given Ocasio’s shield number, 15417, which five years ago had been assigned to Officer Christopher Colon, who works with Gomez at the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

​Ocasio, now 57, pinned the new shield on Gomez’s uniform.

“I had a great career,” Ocasio told reporters. “This was the cherry on top…. It’s very fulfilling.”

Ocasio said he can tell himself if he dies tomorrow: “You did well. You left a lasting impact, and hopefully you’re passing that torch so that she will have the same impact,” Ocasio added. “I’m sure she will.”

Claudio, now 60, said he was thrilled to learn Gomez “joined our family.”

“This is a family,” he said of the NYPD. “I feel like I gained another daughter.”

​The day of the rescue, July 22, 1996, Ocasio and Claudio, who at the time were officers assigned to a plainclothes anti-crime unit at the 25th Precinct in East Harlem, were on patrol, watching for a crew responsible for pulling robberies on check-cashing businesses.

They saw a car stopped at a red light on E. 116th St. near Park Ave. that was leaking gasoline.

The cops ran over but before they could rescue those inside — Dennise, her brother Kevin and their mom Hortencia Calderon, then 29 — a fire erupted. All three were trapped in the locked car.

Ocasio broke the driver’s side window with his police radio and, aided by a nearby good Samaritan, he pulled the mom to safety.

Claudio pulled Dennise and Kevin from the car — despite some struggle required to free Kevin from the seat in the back of the car into which he was strapped.

Claudio sprained his ankle and Ocasio suffered smoke inhalation, but remarkably the family was not hurt.

“It’s when we sat down at the hospital that it really hit us,” Claudio told the Daily News at the time. “That car could have exploded.”

After that, the cops moved on with their careers, never to see the family again — though both said they often recalled the incident, and wondered how everyone turned out.

After Gomez wrote her Police Academy essay she told an instructor she’d love to meet the officers who saved her and her family.

Ocasio and Gomez, both whom retired more than a decade ago, now live in the same Florida town — Ocasio is a security supervisor, and Claudio just retired from his second career, in corrections.

They were floored when they got a call from the NYPD about Gomez, and more than thrilled to return to New York to meet her. Both retired officers flew in with their families to meet Gomez.

Colon, who was also at the One Police Plaza event, didn’t know until late last month that Gomez was lucky to be alive — and that he had Ocasio’s shield number.

He said giving it up was a no-brainer. He now has shield number 1990, for his birth year.

Police Commissioner Edward Caban said the saga is more than just a story about two cops rising to the occasion.

“It’s about the split second it takes to change a person’s life forever,” Caban said. “When we say that police officers make a clear difference, it’s clearly not just words. For officers Ocasio and Claudio, that difference is Dennise Gomez.

“Her life is their legacy and their work her work.”