Staff Reporter: An off-duty cop assigned to the 104th Precinct in Ridgewood was arrested during the early morning hours of Sunday, April 6, after police from the 116th Precinct in Rosedale found an arsenal of firearms in his Laurelton home with some of the guns stored in the bedroom of his 15-month-old daughter.
Police Officer Jason McLeod, 37, was arraigned in Queens Criminal Court later in the day on a complaint charging him with endangering the welfare of a child and 15 counts of failure to safely store firearms in the first degree.
The mother of the child, who lives with McLeod at the Laurelton home, called police to the residence the previous night, complaining that her partner had 15 firearms throughout the house, according to the criminal complaint. She allowed officers to search the premises and showed a sergeant where three firearms were located. They went to a bedroom where another two were recovered in an unlocked drawer on a coffee table next to the bed. Three shotguns or rifles and another handgun were under the bed. She then led them to an unlocked bedroom closet, where they found two handguns in a plastic bag, another handgun in a separate plastic bag, and two rifles in shotgun bags. Officers searched another bedroom closet and recovered three handguns and several magazines in a closed but unlocked safe.
The sergeant said he found ammunition throughout the bedroom. The rest of the firearms were recovered from other parts of the home. None of them were contained in a securely locked container, safe storage depository, or in a gun-locking device, according to the criminal complaint.
The sergeant found the child in a crib in the bedroom where the weapons were stored. He said he checked an NYPD database and found that none of the firearms were registered. NYPD officers are required to fill out a list of firearms they are authorized to carry on a Force Card. A duty captain from the Community Affairs Section found that only one of the fifteen firearms, a SIG P365, was on Officer McLeod’s Force Card as his only authorized off-duty firearm.
McLeod was arraigned before Queens Criminal Court Judge Anthony Battisti and released on his own recognizance without bail. He was ordered to return to court on May 27.
McLeod joined the NYPD in 2022 and has no previous disciplinary history. He was suspended without pay following his arrest.
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