The off-duty narcotics officer was arrested Friday night for shooting two people while the three drunkenly gallivanted on Amsterdam Avenue was reportedly on the tail end of a weeklong bender. Neighbors tell the Post that Victor Zambrano Jr., 49, was spotted drunk in the middle of the week: "Last week, he started to drink. I saw him drunk on Wednesday," said Zambrano’s next-door neighbor, Felipe Jaramillo, a liquor-store worker. "He’s been drinking every day," another local added.
Zambrano, a New York State Bureau of Narcotics enforcement agent, allegedly gave his .40 caliber Glock to 31-year-old Nichola Davidson when she asked to hold it on West 82nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue around 9 p.m. Friday. Davidson was reportedly worried that he was too drunk to have it on him, and a struggle ensued when he tried to get it back.
"She was actually kind of shocked," witness Wendell Santiago told CBS. "It happened so quick as didn’t even know what happened. She just looked and saw her foot was bleeding and her boyfriend saw that she was bleeding and that’s when he went off running after the guy."
Zambrano allegedly also shot Davidson's boyfriend, 42-year-old Sydney Bernard-Whitehead, in the right calf. The NYPD responded, and a tense standoff followed for a few minutes when Zambrano refused to give up the gun.
"They were shouting ‘Drop the gun! Drop the gun!’ but he wouldn’t," a witness told the News. "A cop knocked it down and wrestled him the ground."
Zambrano has been charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon, resisting arrest and reckless endangerment. He was taken from the 20th Precinct stationhouse to New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center on Saturday after he complained of chest pains.
Zambrano's son sounded less than amused by his father's antics: "Same old s---, different day," he told the News.
