A killer who fatally shot an NYPD cop in the head in Brooklyn nearly 40 years ago is up for release — but the victim’s outraged daughter wants him to remain behind bars for the “for the rest of his life.”
Francisco Rodriguez was 22 and had been out of prison on parole for just 42 days when he killed Transit Officer Robert Venable on Sept. 22, 1987.
“It doesn’t matter if he is a model prisoner or if he helped others,” Januari Venable, who was 8 when her dad was murdered, told the state Parole Board on Oct. 11. “Because of him I didn’t get to have a dad. I didn’t get to have somebody there for me that could tell me everything would be all right.”
Now 58, Rodriguez is behind bars at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County. If he is paroled, he will become the 43rd cop killer freed by the state since 2017.
Officer Venable, a single dad, called his daughter the night of his murder to let her know he’d be home late.
“I was the last one to talk to him,” she said. “He said he had an arrest so he was going to be home late. He said, ‘Go to bed’ because I used to wait up for him.”
Venable and six other transit cops responded to a call of an armed man on Pitkin Avenue in East New York, Brooklyn, while transporting prisoners.
Venable was searching the area when two men burst out of a Pitkin Avenue building and began firing, striking Venable, who was in plainclothes, once in the head. An Uzi was one of the weapons used in the attack, cops said at the time.
He was rushed to the hospital and fought until his final breath.
“My aunt said that the night everything happened, he coded three times,” the daughter recalled. “He was a fighter and he was fighting for his life.”
Rodriguez was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 37 years to life in prison.
Cop killers are being set loose in large part because of a 2017 revision to rules governing how the 17-member parole board weighs a prisoner’s release, thanks to years of lobbying by reformers and legal groups, a law enforcement source said.
A “risk and needs assessment” score considering factors such as an inmate’s age and record while in prison now “controls the process” rather than the seriousness of the crime.
Venable’s daughter is angry.
“He’s at an age where he could have a whole life,” she said of the killer. “It just seems tragic that he could be rewarded for doing something so horrific.”
“My grandmother used to always say that Mr. Rodriguez’s family could still visit him and look in his eyes and the only thing we had to visit was a gravestone,” she said.
“He should be in jail for the rest of his life.”
Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry called on New Yorkers to support the cop’s daughter and write letters on her behalf.
“Police Officer Robert Venable was his family’s rock, but now they’re facing an incredibly tough fight without him,” Hendry said. “We cannot let them fight alone. We need every New Yorker to step up and support them. . . . Send the the parole board a message that his killer should never walk free.”
