The off-duty Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent died after being taken to a hospital with a gunshot wound. ATF officials said he was in that he was simply in the area at the time of the incident, though his father James Capano, 81, confirmed that he was in the area to do an errand for his dad. Continue reading after the jump. Continue reading after the jump.

Capri S.


‘I was going down to the store. He said “No, I’ll go”,’ James Capano said.
‘I should have gone, I’m just trying to accept it,’ he told The New York Daily News.
Though he brushed it off, heroism seems to run in the family as the elder Capano is a retired NYPD detective.
‘He never walked away from anything. He always got involved,’ the devastated dad said.
‘I don;t know where he gets it from. They say he got it from me.’
ATF Special Agent Joe Anarumo told Newsday that Mr Capano lived in the Seaford-Long Island area and was an explosives expert who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mr Capano worked with the ATF for 23 years and is the father of two.
Government officials are now paying tribute to the hero, including Representative Peter King who has known John personally for many years as Mr King’s wife was the agent’s fourth grade teacher.
‘He had a unique personality, a great personality. Everybody loved him,’ Mr King said.

Mr King presented Mr Capano with an award after he recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan where he was teaching military personnel about explosives.
Mr Capano’s long-time friend Greg Rosati pointed out the bitter irony of the situation to The New York Post.
‘He was in Afghanistan, in Iraq diffusing bombs. Then he comes home, gets his father’s prescription and gets killed. It’s like a movie,’ said Mr Rosati.
‘He was a man’s man. A hero.’
Mr Smith said an unidentified man entered the pharmacy in Seaford and announced a robbery about 2pm, looking for painkillers and money.
He said that as the man was leaving the store, he was confronted by three individuals – the ATF agent, an off-duty city police officer and a retired Nassau County police officer.
Shots rang out, and the suspect was struck, the painkillers and cash dropping to the ground, Mr Smith said. The ATF agent also was wounded.
It was not immediately clear who shot agent Capano, or how or why the agent, the off-duty officer and retired officer arrived at the location at about the same time.
The ATF agent was taken to Nassau County Medical Center in East Meadow, where he died. The NYPD officer and retired police officer also were taken to the hospital to be treated for trauma.

Police closed off the sidewalk with tape and covered the body with a white sheet while they investigated, said Razov Felice, owner of an Italian restaurant located down the street. Felice said the area has been struggling with a growing tide of prescription drug abuse.
‘There is a lot of problem in Long Island with these drugs,’ Felice said. ‘I don’t know what people are thinking. The more people talk about these drugs, the more people are trying them,’ he continued.
The shooting occurred about 30 miles west of another Long Island pharmacy where four people were gunned down by a drug addict during a robbery in June on Father’s Day.
Nationwide, armed robberies at pharmacies rose 81 percent between 2006 and 2010, from 380 to 686, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
There have been a number of incidents in which New York-area police have fired at off-duty officers who were responding to a crime.
In March, an off-duty Metropolitan Transportation Authority police authority officer shot a Nassau County police officer who was in plainclothes and carrying a rifle. Both men were responding to a crime scene in the town of Massapequa Park.
In May, a New York Police Department officer shot and killed an off-duty colleague who was carrying a gun while chasing a suspected car thief in East Harlem.
In 2008, Westchester County police officers killed an off-duty officer from the New York suburb of Mount Vernon, N.Y. as he was intervening in a fight.

DM