The self-radicalized madman who attacked four rookie Queens cops with a hatchet had more than just jihad on his mind — he also wanted to kill white people.
“He wanted white people to pay for all that slavery and all that racism,” the father of slain hatchet loon Zale Thompson, 32, told The Post Saturday. “I think he committed suicide — and he was taking one of y’all with him,” his father, Ralph Thompson, said, speaking through the screen door of the two-story Queens Village house where his unhinged son also once lived.
“He just said, ‘They have to pay for all their unfairness,’ ” the father added. “Unfairness for the way they treat black people.”
Zale Thompson, 32, was shot dead on a Jamaica, Queens, sidewalk Thursday after he lunged with a blue-handled hatchet at four rookie cops, striking Officer Joseph Meeker, 24, in the arm and Officer Kenneth Healey, 25, in the back of the head. Both those officers are white, as is the third cop. The fourth cop is a light-skinned Hispanic.
“I didn’t know it would get that serious,” the father said wearily of his son, a Navy veteran described by former friends as “bright” but radically pro-“black power” in his youth and a Muslim convert in recent years.
“I didn’t know he was going to carry on a mission on his own,” added the father.
Unconnected to any terror group or even any mosque, and with no criminal record in New York, Zale Thompson was unknown to law enforcement as a potential threat, police sources said.
But over the last several years, he was quietly becoming an ardent devourer of violent Islamic propaganda, police said.
Video: Devon McCarthy
“This guy spent every waking moment on the Internet,” said one law-enforcement source. Police are looking back as far as five years to see whether anyone else Thompson communicated with is a threat.
“He Googled the words ‘jihad against police,’ ” the source said of Thompson’s more recent activity. “He also looked up [news stories on] the two Canadian attacks” last week, the source added, referring to so-called “lone wolf” jihadist shooting of a ceremonial guard in Ottawa and a fatal attack on a soldier in Quebec.
Following the attack, police brass on Friday ordered that foot patrols citywide be conducted in pairs.
“Strike their police, security and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents,” ISIS spokesman Aub Mohammad al-Adnani posted on Sept. 21. “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him or poison him.”
Another extremist essay — titled, “To 2.6M Muslims in USA: A Call to Arms to Defend Islam and Avenge the Slaughter of Muslims” and published Sept. 16 — directly encouraged jihadi wannabes to attack cops.
“Knocking off a police, military or any other law-enforcement officer sends a chilling message to the so-called ‘civilians’ and fills their hearts with consternation,” it reads.
Zale Thompson’s own rants mirrored the hate-mongers’ rhetoric. “America’s military is strong abroad, but they have never faced an internal mass revolt,” he wrote on Facebook, where his page featured a photo of a Muslim warrior with a turban and sword. “They are weaker at home. We are scattered and decentralized, we can use this as an advantage.”
ISIS especially knows how to “hit a lot of different kinds of people’s buttons,” noted David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center of Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University.
“It can be about violence or adventure,” he said. “It can be about the politics.”
Thompson’s downward spiral may have begun in the Navy. He enlisted in early 2001 and spent nearly two years stationed on California’s Ventura County naval base as a “Seabee,” a nickname for a construction-worker soldier.
A Navy source described Thompson as a “troublemaker” who “wasn’t a good sailor.” Suspected drug use and numerous unauthorized absences got him booted from the Navy in August 2003, the source said.
On another five occasions between 2003 and 2004, he was accused of domestic violence. The outcomes of those cases were unclear.
Neighbors said Thompson continued to claim he was “on leave” as recently as this summer. When neighbors would ask him how he was spending his time at home, “He said, ‘I’m reading the Koran. I converted to Islam,’ ” said one neighbor, asking his name not be revealed.
Meanwhile Saturday, Healey, the officer most seriously injured, continued his recovery in Jamaica Hospital.
“He wants to get strong, and is concerned whether he’s going to ever be a cop again,” said one source.
Bystander LaToya James, 29, struck in the back by a stray police bullet during the melee, remains at Jamaica Hospital. Her condition is unknown.