A killer who fatally shot an NYPD officer in the head in Brooklyn nearly 40 years ago is about to be released — but the victim’s furious daughter wants him behind bars for “the rest of his life.”
Francisco Rodriguez was 22 and had been on parole for only 42 days when he murdered transit officer Robert Venable on September 22, 1987.
“It doesn’t matter if he’s a model prisoner or if he’s helped others,” January Venable, who was 8 when her father was killed, told the state parole board Oct. 11. “Because of him I didn’t get to have a father. I couldn’t have someone in front of me to tell me everything was going to be okay.”
Rodriguez, now 58, is behind bars at the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County. If he is released on parole, he will become the 43rd cop killer released by the state since 2017.
Officer Venable, a single father, called his daughter the night of the murder to let her know he would be home late.
“I was the last person to talk to him,” she said. “He said he was arrested so he would be home late. He said, ‘Go to bed,’ because I was always waiting for him.”
Venable and six other transit officers 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 shooting, hitting Venable, who was dressed in plain clothes, once in the head. An Uzi was one of the weapons used in the attack, police said at the time.
He was rushed to the hospital and fought until his last breath.
“My aunt said he coded three times the night everything happened,” the daughter recalled. “He was a fighter and he fought for his life.”
Rodriguez was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 37 years to life in prison.
Cop killers are being released in large part because of a 2017 overhaul of rules governing how the 17-member parole board weighs an inmate’s release, thanks to years of lobbying by reformers and legal groups, a law enforcement source said.
A “risk and needs assessment” score that takes into account factors such as a prisoner’s age and record while in prison now “controls the process” rather than the severity 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 something so heinous.”
“My grandmother always said that Mr. Rodriguez’s family could still visit him and look into his eyes and that the only thing we had to visit was a gravestone,” she said.
“He should spend the rest of his life in prison.”
Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association, called on New Yorkers to support the officer’s daughter and write letters on her behalf.
“Police officer Robert Venable has been the rock of his family, but now they face an incredibly tough fight without him,” Hendry said. “We can’t let them fight alone. We need every New Yorker to step up and support them. . . . Send the parole board a message that his killer should never walk free.”
