After Shooting, An Officer Sees Life More Clearly All Buddy Murphy Wanted Was To Be A Good Cop. For His Brother, He Worries About The Police Force's Future.

The force of the gunshot knocked him down and kept him there, kicking and jerking, trying to get back on his feet.

But Police Officer Bernard "Buddy" Murphy, 43, wasn't going anywhere. Blood poured from the hole in his neck, puddling in the small of his back beneath his bulletproof vest. He was bleeding to death. And what ran through his mind, he recalled, was the punch line of an old joke: I've fallen and I can't get up.

After making hundreds of car stops during almost 22 years on the street, this one, in the early morning hours of Feb. 8, had gone horribly wrong.

Murphy lay in the middle of 19th Street, shot, police say, by an 18-year- old with a stolen gun. His assailant stepped from the Pontiac sedan and pointed the gun at him again.

"I knew I was going to die," Murphy said in an interview at his Fishtown home. "And then I heard my brother yell - I don't even know what he yelled - and now my man points the gun at my brother. And I hear him shoot at my brother. And I hear my brother shoot back."

One of the shots carved a notch into the rim of Officer Shawn Murphy's left ear. Shawn's gunfire missed the gunman, who fled.

Today, Shawn, 27, who followed his only brother into the department four years ago, is back at work. Buddy Murphy's return won't be so quick.

On the left side of his neck, above the collarbone, is a small red mark where the slug went in, and on his back, near the left shoulder blade, is a larger spot where it came out.

Dead one minute, alive the next - and elated to be here. That's how Buddy Murphy views that night in North Philadelphia. He says the experience hasn't changed his life; he was ready to meet his Maker then and now.

But in many ways, the shooting has crystallized his feelings - about life, about his brother and about the department where he's spent more than two decades on front-line patrol.

Some of those feelings are good, very good. Like the way police from across the city - black and white, male and female - poured into Temple University Hospital after the shooting, pushing past the police brass to reach him and cheering his survival as a collective victory over evil.

But some of them aren't so good. Like the way the city has cut disability payments to injured officers by 25 percent. And the way the patrol cars are constantly down for repairs. And the way that, frankly, some police officers out there today do the bare minimum to collect a check.