Oct 4, 2012 No Comments ›› Chuck Biscuits

Excerpted from The New York Post: An unarmed Army National Guardsman was pulled over on a Queens highway and shot to death by an NYPD officer from an elite unit today — and the DA now is probing the incident that the victim’s friend is calling a case of police “road rage.”

Noel Polanco, 22, had his hands on the steering wheel of his 2012 Honda Fit moments before Detective Hassan Hamdy shot him once in the torso, a woman sitting in the front passenger seat told police, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said.

It is “unknown” if Polanco moved after Hamdy, 39, yelled, “Show me your hands!” to the three people in the car — one of them a sleeping off-duty cop in the back seat— on the Grand Central Parkway near La Guardia Airport at 5:15 a.m. today, Browne said.

The woman in the front seat, a bartender named Diane DeFerrari, “said she complied with the cop’s direction to raise her hands,” Browne said.

“The last thing she saw was [Polanco’s] hands on the steering wheel,” Browne added.

No weapon was found in the car. An electric drill was found on the driver’s-side floor.

“The matter is under investigation,” said a spokeswoman for Queens District Attorney Richard Brown.

DeFerrari, in a blistering statement tonight outside the Astoria nightclub where she worked with Polanco, accused the cops of killing him in “an act of road rage . . . because my friend cut off the police” without knowing they were NYPD officers.

“The police proceeded to try to chase us, sticking their middle finger at us and screaming obscenities at the car trying to pull us over and veered us into the divider of the left lane of the Grand Central Parkway,” DeFerrari said.

“To pull you over and ask for your license and registration is one thing,” she said.

But DeFerrari, 36, said the cops jumped “out of a vehicle rifles drawn and [said] simultaneously ‘Put your hands up,”and I hear a pop which came in through my driver’s side window.”

“They could have hit me,” she said. “I’m a mother of three.”

“My friend – the only movement that was in the car when they say that they saw movement was when his hands were on the wheels and he shifted them down because he knew he was going to go to jail. At no point did he think he was going to be shot and killed.”

“An

d then they had us with our hands on the vehicle telling us your friend shot himself. I looked at the police officer,” she said. “I was in utter shock. I couldn’t at any time argue with them because these were the guys who shot my friend and there was no one else there to protect me. I didn’t know what they were going to do to me.”