NYPD Detective Steven McDonald Memorial Mass Held at St. Pat’s

The annual memorial mass for NYPD Detective Steven McDonald was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026. Among those present were his mother, Patricia; his wife, Patti Ann, and their two children; and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. McDonald died on that same day in 2017, aged 59—more than 30 years after he was severely wounded while on duty in Central Park.

The date was Saturday, July 12, 1986. Then officer McDonald, 29, and his partner, Sgt. Peter King, 26, of the Central Park Precinct, were in plainclothes, patrolling the northern end of the park in an unmarked car, looking for suspects in a recent bicycle theft. Spotting three suspicions male youths, the cops sought to question them.

McDonald followed the suspects down a path near the Harlem Meer. “Hey, Sarge, I got them right here,” he yelled before one of the youths, 15-year-old Shavod Jones, pulled a .22 caliber revolver from his sock and shot McDonald three times. The first bullet struck the officer’s head above the eye; the second hit his throat; the third blasted into his spine.

McDonald was rushed to Metropolitan Hospital at First Avenue and East 98th Street and, miraculously, he survived. With all respect to the emergency personnel, doctors and nurses, a photograph of the wounded McDonald on a stretcher, affirm the aptness of that word “miracle.”

McDonald, who’d been a Navy Corpsman before joining NYPD, was a third-generation cop. He’d been on the force less than two years and was married for just eight months. His wife, meanwhile, was three months pregnant with their first child. McDonald, intubated and thereafter a quadriplegic, would remain hospitalized for 18 more months—a significant chunk of the five years some doctors expected he’d live for.

Justice and Absolution

Despite briefly trying to flee and throwing his gun into Harlem Meer, Shavod Jones and his two accomplices were immediately arrested. Jones especially was a hard case and already awaiting sentencing on a knife-point-robbery charge when he shot McDonald. In January 1987, Jones was sentenced to 3-1/3 to 10 years in prison—a seemingly light, or at least merciful, sentence even for a 15-year-old.

The same month Jones was sentenced, the McDonalds’ son Conor was born. Though initially filled with rage and desperation, Officer McDonald stunned everyone on the day of Conor’s baptism, when Patti Ann announced that Steven had forgiven the boy who’d nearly killed him.

Her voice sometimes breaking, Patti Ann read his words: “I’m sometimes angry at the teenage boy who shot me. But more often I feel sorry for him. I only hope that he can turn his life into helping and not hurting people. I forgive him and hope that he can find peace and purpose in his life.”

In most ways, that hope would turn out to be unfounded. Jones’s time in prison was difficult, and he died days after his September 1995 release in an East Harlem motorcycle-riding accident. Jones once called McDonald from prison to express his sorrow and sympathy, and McDonald wished him well, hoping they could work together in the future.

Jones’s death precluded that, but McDonald—who was promoted to NYPD Detective First Grade in 2003—would still credit him often for all that he, Jones, had helped him accomplish.

(A Daily News story by Kerry Burke and Larry McShane, published after McDonald’s own passing, following a severe heart attack, on Jan. 10, 2017—headlined “Life was suffering for Shavod Jones, who died before he could redeem himself for Det. McDonald’s paralysis”—offers some insight into these briefly intersecting and then parallel, and foreshortened lives.)

There’s Steven McDonald—who became deeply, as opposed to circumstantially, Catholic following his injuries—traveling to Belfast, Northern Ireland, between 1998 and 2000 with Franciscan friar (and FDNY chaplain) Father Mychal Judge, promoting forgiveness and non-violent conflict resolution. The ironies of these missions are beyond abundant given Father Judge’s fate on 9-11.

There’s Steven McDonald at countless youth and other events, bringing the same message, including once, in 2015, to St. Stephen’s Church in Warwick, NY.

Speaking to Murray Weiss of DNAInfo the day before Patti Ann and Conor McDonald, then an NYPD sergeant, had Steven removed from life support, then Detective’s Endowment Association president Michael Paladino said, “So many people have been showing up who you can hear asking themselves, ‘How I am going to get on without him?’ It is hard to realize how much work he has done with, and for, people, and how encouraging and inspirational a figure he has been. He has accomplished more confined to a wheelchair than most people who are not.”

A Legacy of Inspiration

Among McDonald’s numerous honors, three are visible to the public in Manhattan. At 59 Maiden Lane, the Finest Federal Credit Union was renamed for McDonald.

In Central Park, the 86th Street Traverse is co-named Detective Steven McDonald Way. Also in the park, near East 108th Street and Fifth Avenue, a plaque marks the spot near where McDonald was shot. It reads “Born out of tragedy in 1986, came a life of service and forgiveness. Steven became a messenger of hope and goodwill to the community and city he loved.”

Today, Patti Ann McDonald is a familiar and revered figure at numerous police charity events while Conor, is a captain in the NYPD press office, formally known as DCPI, short for Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.

Conor is a fourth-generation NYPD cop and, turning the tables on the information officer, Straus News is honored to share the following departmental account of his family’s progenitor, Patrolman James J, Conway, who was awarded the Police Combat Cross, the department’s second-highest award for valor.

From the 1937 NYPD Annual Report, under then Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine:

“Detective James J. Conway, Shield No. 104, 8th Detective District, 18th Division (was Patrolman, Shield No. 14933, attached to the 43rd Precinct at time of occurrence.) At about 1:30 A.M., November 12, 1936, on patrol duty, accosted two holdup men, armed with revolvers, as they were escaping from a store at 1800 Westchester Avenue, Bronx. Although he had been seriously shot in the chest, he fired several shots at an automobile in which they fled, and then entered a Department automobile operated by another Patrolman and pursued the bandits. Several shots were fired during the pursuit and upon forcing the automobile into curb, both bandits were arrested and two discarded revolvers were recovered. Patrolman Conway was on sick report until January 12, 1937.”