Here we go again: The family of another murdered cop is fighting to keep the killer behind bars, where he belongs.
Eddie Matos is serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for the murder of NYPD Officer Anthony Dwyer. Denied parole twice, he’s up for another hearing next month.
Dwyer, 23, was pursuing Matos after a 1989 burglary at the McDonald’s in Times Square when the perp shoved him down a 25-foot air shaft to his death.
“My son will never get a chance to come back to his family,” says the victim’s mother, Marjorie Dwyer. “This guy does not deserve a chance either. He should stay there and rot in hell, as far as I’m concerned.”
Any murder merits severe punishment, but cop-killers strike at the core of public safety. That’s why there was long a presumption against ever granting them parole.
As Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association chief Pat Lynch put it in May 2014, when Matos first came up for parole, “There is a kind of evil that cannot be rehabilitated.”
Yet the Dwyer family has plenty of reason to worry. After all, cop-killer Herman Bell, who intentionally lured two NYPD cops into a deadly 1971 ambush, got out on parole last month — which bodes well for his accomplice, Anthony Bottom, who, like Matos, is up for a hearing in June.
If Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s appointments have shifted the Parole Board enough, New York may start seeing every cop-killer get sprung.