NYPD cop killer faces release as victim’s daughter fights back

A murderer who fatally shot an NYPD cop in the head in Brooklyn nearly 40 years ago is set to be released – but the victim’s outraged daughter wants him to rot behind bars “for the rest of his life.”

Francisco Rodriguez was 22 years old and only 42 days out of prison on parole when he killed transit officer Robert Venable on September 22, 1987.

“It doesn’t matter if he’s a model prisoner or if he’s helped others,” Januaryi Venable, who was 8 when her father was killed, told the state parole board on Oct. 11. “Because of him I didn’t get anything to have a father. I couldn’t have anyone by my side to tell me everything was going to be okay.”

Rodriguez, 58, is behind bars at the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County. If he is granted parole, he would be the 44th cop killer released by the state since 2017.

Officer Venable, a single father, called his daughter the night of his murder to tell her he would be home late.

“I was the last person to talk to him,” she said. “He said he had been arrested and would therefore be home late. He said, ‘Go to bed,’ because I was always waiting for him.”

Venable and six other traffic 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 stormed out of a building on Pitkin Avenue and began shooting. They hit Venable, who was dressed in civilian clothes, once in the head. One of the weapons used in the attack was an Uzi, police said at the time.

He was taken 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 fought for his life.”

Rodriguez was convicted of second-degree murder 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 a prisoner’s release, thanks to years of lobbying by reformers and rights groups, a law enforcement source said.

A “risk and needs assessment,” which takes into account factors such as the inmate’s age and history 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 live a whole life,” she said of the killer. “It just seems tragic that he could be rewarded for something so terrible.”

“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 stay in prison for the rest of his life.”

Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry urged New Yorkers to support the officer’s daughter and write letters on her behalf.

“Police Officer Robert Venable was his family’s rock, but now they face an incredibly tough battle without him,” Hendry said. “We can’t let them fight alone. We need every New Yorker to step up and support them. . . . Send a message to the parole board that his murderer should never be released.”