Bealefeld and Sullivan jumped from the car. "We're looking west up the alley," Bealefeld said. "A guy walked out and started shooting. You could see the muzzle flash. You know it is a gun, a big gun."
They saw a second man shooting.
Sullivan and the commissioner ran up the alley toward the gunfire.
"We were getting closer, they fired the gun again," Bealefeld said.
The commissioner chased them into a backyard. "Peter yells 'Police! Police! Stop!' " Bealefeld said.
The men ducked into the basement of a rowhouse in the 2500 block of W. Fairmount Ave., with Bealefeld and Sullivan in pursuit.
Inside, Bealefeld and Sullivan encountered a roomful of people. The police commissioner spotted one of the suspects there and held him downstairs. Sullivan went upstairs to find the other.
"For a little minute, we were in there by ourselves," Bealefeld said.
The second member of the commissioner's protection unit, Annie Miller, had called for backup. She was outside and did not know which rowhouse the commissioner had entered.
Bealefeld got on the radio, too, and called in the address for the rowhouse. "I was on the radio saying Unit One," he said.
He then added the code that set the whole force on edge: "Signal 13."
So many cars responded to the distress call that Bealefeld worried about protection in other parts of the city, causing him to have mixed feelings about the incident.
"This is the professional dilemma of being the police commissioner and being out on the street. I was grateful for the backup. But we have other cops in the city. We have to be covering them too."
In the end, police arrested Davon Rogers, 23, and Devin Rogers, 18. Each was charged with illegally firing a gun in the city, records show. And officers seized two sawed-off shotguns, a Remington and a Mossberg, police said.
Shortly afterward, Bealefeld fielded an angry phone call from his wife, who had become worried when he did not call her at midnight on New Year's Eve as he normally does.
Her first question was whether he was wearing a bullet-resistant vest. He told her he was.
