A 4-year-old girl innocently plucked a photo from her mom’s open casket — a week after police say she and her brother watched her former cop father fatally shoot her mother.
“Put Mommy’s photo back,” a mourner said to little Mimi, whose mother, Jessica Mera, was laid to rest on Saturday.
“She needs that when she’s dreaming.”
Mimi wore a pink sweatshirt and pink leggings under her gray dress. She stood for long stretches near the coffin at the front of James Romenelli-Stephen Funeral Home in Ozone Park, Queens.
It was hard to tell whether the pig-tailed girl understood that her mother was dead.
The two children were at home during the shooting, tears rolling down their faces as a neighbor took them to a nearby bodega.
“It’s just so terrible,” one devastated mourner said.
At one point during the service, Mimi played tag with her 7-year-old brother inside a viewing room at the funeral home. The boy, more somber than his sister, wore a plaid button-down shirt and a blue fedora.
The siblings were together on April 19 inside their home on 104th St. It was just before 11 a.m. when retired cop Kevin Canty, 43, whipped out a 9-mm. handgun and blasted his wife 10 times. Bullets hit the 40-year-old mom in the midsection, upper chest, breast, arm and armpit, a source told the Daily News. She died at Jamaica Hospital.
Canty, who claimed his wife was cheating on him, was stumbling around drunk when he was arrested near the corner of 97th and Centerville Sts. shortly after the shooting. He still had the weapon on him when he was busted.
The former transit cop, who retired in 2013 after suffering a rotator cuff injury while leading self-defense training at the Police Academy, has been charged with second-degree murder. He was ordered held without bail while undergoing a psychiatric evaluation at Bellevue Hospital and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
The two children were at home during the shooting, tears rolling down their faces as a neighbor took them to a nearby bodega. “Daddy shot Mommy!” they screamed. “Daddy shot Mommy!”
Surveillance video obtained by The News showed the brother and sister with their mom inside the same bodega — about an hour before she was gunned down.
Mera was buried in Long Island on Saturday at Breslau Cemetery in Lindenhurst.
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