Moment of Madness Destroys Two Lives of Quiet Promise : New York: It began with illegal parking; then a bucket cracked open police officer’s head. Assailant is called an unlikely murderer.

Before tragedy struck, John Williamson and Pedro Gil lived in the same city. But they were worlds apart.

Williamson, 25, was a police officer, a Boy Scout leader, a product of a middle-class Queens neighborhood. Gil, 22, was a Dominican immigrant, a dishwasher, a resident of the crime-ridden Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.

If there was one similarity, it was that both had avoided trouble in an urban landscape that often lays young lives to waste.

All that changed one cool fall evening.

At 10 p.m. on Oct. 8, a fleet of city tow trucks aided by Housing Police officers began removing double-parked cars in Gil’s neighborhood, a place with a history of tension between residents and police.

An angry crowd gathered. Officers moved in to restore order. And in a moment of madness, Gil made a terrible mistake.

The result: Williamson was mortally wounded, his head cracked open by a bucket of spackle flung from a nearby building. Gil was arrested three days later and accused of murder.

Now, two lives of quiet promise are forever, tragically linked.

By traditional standards, John Williamson was the stuff of a New York cop: white, middle-class, Irish, Catholic.

He grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, in an Irish and Jewish enclave of tidy, five-story brick apartment buildings. At his death, he still shared a home with his parents and younger brother and sister.

He was a big, carefree lad who like playing hockey. He also was good at making friends--and keeping them, said Peter Riboni, 23, a childhood companion.

“He always was an outgoing guy,” Riboni said. “He was someone who would break his back for you.”

After graduating from high school, Williamson took business courses at St. John’s University and worked part time at a bowling alley. But friends say he tired of his studies, dropped out and drifted.

At the urging of two buddies, he joined them in taking the police exam. He soon entered the Police Academy and emerged to become a valued member of the Housing Police, the force charged with policing the city’s low-income housing complexes.

In his three years on the job, Williamson received four medals for excellent police duty. One was for chasing down a gunman who had shot five people, police officials said.

Off duty, he spent time with his fiancee, led a Boy Scout troop on weekend outings and occasionally hung out with the old neighborhood gang at Budd’s Bar, where his brother worked.

“This was someone who had everything to live for,” Riboni said.

*

Across the East River, Pedro Gil toiled in a neighborhood that rations hope in smaller doses.

Mainly populated with immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Washington Heights is plagued by drugs. Crack cocaine is cheap and plentiful on neighborhood corners, leading many young men to become addicts and school dropouts.

But Gil, who came to the United States after his father opened a restaurant in Washington Heights 10 years ago, steered away from drugs and toward a better life. He never once ran into trouble with the law, his friends and family said.

“I can tell you right off the bat, he’s just a lovely young man,” said Moises Perez, director of a community center where Gil took English classes and become a favorite among staff members.

“He was somewhat shy and definitely gentle,” Perez said.

Gil’s gentle side often emerged at the restaurant, where he and his siblings worked day and night. Toward closing, he was known to ask the cook to fill plates with rice and beans to give to the homeless men wandering the streets.

He also was busy taking classes in preparation for his high school equivalency exam, Perez said. “He was interested in the restaurant business, like his father,” he said.

What happened the night of Friday, Oct. 8, “is just inexplicable,” Perez said. “He did not have a hardened heart.

“But something went over him and he did something he’ll regret the rest of his life.”

*

The bucket of spackle weighed 30 pounds.

It sat on the roof of a six-story building as the tow trucks began pulling the double- and triple-parked cars off the neighborhood’s crowded streets.

Gil later said that he became involved when “some cop came out and started getting nasty with one of my friends” whose car was being towed “for nothing.”

After several people began fighting with Williamson and other officers, Gil decided to run up on the roof “to get a better look at what was going on,” he said. By the time he reached the top, the scene below had calmed down. But Gil apparently had not.

He grabbed the bucket, then tossed it over without looking, he said in his statement to police.

The bucket crashed down on Williamson’s head. His blood splattered everywhere. And some in a crowd of about 100 people began to cheer, other officers said later.

Learning of Williamson’s death the next day, Gil fled to the Dominican Republic as police launched a massive manhunt and the city’s tabloids geared up. A $30,000 reward was offered.

The killing even became an issue in the campaign for mayor.

A city official mistakenly said the city would stop towing cars in the neighborhood, leaving an opening for Mayor David Dinkins’ Republican challenger, Rudolph Giuliani, to fire an anti-crime volley.

He accused Dinkins of sending “a message that the city has given in to an urban terrorist and that if you want to get your way, kill a police officer and cheer about it.”

*

Away from all the furor, Gil’s father, who was vacationing in the Dominican Republic, persuaded his son to turn himself in.

The following Monday, Gil flew into Kennedy International Airport and was greeted by detectives. The next day, he was charged with second-degree murder, though even law enforcement officials conceded he hardly fit the profile of a murderer.

“I don’t think he set out to be a cop killer,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

Two lives, forever linked.

The day of Pedro Gil’s arraignment, they buried John Williamson in Queens.