Posted on 11/30/2006 6:19:16 PM PST by NormsRevenge
NEW YORK - The search for a witness to a fatal shooting by police intensified with the arrests of four people who have provided clues about the mysterious man's identity, a law enforcement official said Thursday.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the Wednesday apartment raid that led to the arrests was related to the shooting investigation, but he declined to elaborate.
Another law enforcement official later told The Associated Press that the arrests of three men and one woman on gun charges produced information about the identity of an important witness to the shooting, which has set off a storm of outrage in New York.
Police say the witness may have been with the three unarmed men shot early Saturday by five officers who fired a total of 50 rounds at their car. The shooting killed 23-year-old Sean Bell on his wedding day and wounded two of his companions.
Officers with a search warrant raided the Queens apartment, a known drug-dealing location, based on a tip that "persons of interest" lived there, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way. It was unclear if a loaded semiautomatic pistol recovered inside the home had any connection to last week's incident, the official added.
An undercover detective among those involved in the shooting claims he followed four men out of the strip club where Bell had a bachelor party, but the wounded men say no one else was with them.
The unnamed undercover shooter and four others — identified as detectives Mike Oliver, Mark Cooper and Paul Hedley and officer Mike Carey — have been placed on paid administrative leave while the Queens District Attorney's office conducts a grand jury investigation that could result in criminal charges.
The intensity of the search for the mysterious fourth man reflected its potential impact on a case rife with conflicting accounts and unanswered questions about why the five officers unleashed the barrage of bullets.
An undercover officer has told investigators that another missing witness — a man dressed in black and standing in front of a sport utility vehicle — argued with Bell and his companions as they exited the club. The officer was part of a vice team investigating complaints about prostitution and drug dealing at the club.
Outside the club, the man in black reached into his pocket as if he had a weapon as Bell challenged him to a fight and one of the groom's friends said, "Yo, get my gun," two law enforcement officials said, citing the undercover officer's account.
Officials said the exchange prompted a second undercover detective to follow Bell and three other men as they walked away toward their car, apparently suspecting the men meant to arm themselves and attack the man in black.
Moments later, the second undercover officer started shooting at the car when Bell, while trying to drive away, bumped him and smashed into an unmarked police van.
Through his lawyer, the detective has insisted that he clearly identified himself as a police officer as he tried to stop them. He also has said he spotted Joseph Guzman, then sitting in the passenger seat, make a sudden move for his waistband before he and four other officers opened fire.
Police union officials have suggested that a fourth man could have fled with a gun — a scenario investigators have not ruled out.
"The existence of a fourth person is important to this investigation," Kelly said.
Meanwhile, the hospitalized survivors, Guzman and Trent Benefield, still insist there was never a fourth person involved, their lawyer said Thursday.
"The claim of a fourth person is a myth," said the attorney, Sanford Rubenstein.
Bell's funeral is scheduled for Friday at the church where he was to be married.
Reverend Jesse Jackson speaks to Reverend Al Sharpton (R) at a news conference in support of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old bride-groom killed by police on his wedding day, at the site of his death in New York November 29, 2006. REUTERS/Keith Bedford (UNITED STATES)
Caption for pic above..
It's Time to Cut'n'Run , Al.
No such luck, Norm. I'm sure these two will milk this one for all it's worth...and what's it worth? Millions for the bride-to-be? Detectives fired and sued? More marches in the streets? Racial hiring quotas in the NYPD? A minority-packed version of the CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board)? Scary. I just hope that the rest of the world see these two (Jackson and Sharpton) for what they are...all about advancing the interests of blacks at almost any cost, and not really all about finding out what REALLY happened that morning on the street in Queens.
If that's the NYPD policy it was made by somebody who was never close to a gun fight in the streets.
We are busily making it impossible to be a cop in the US.
I would bet that within ten days the FBI and attorney general will take over this investigation. Then in about a year the civil rights violation trial will be starting.
Maybe they've found evidence of a non-NYPD gun being fired at last week's scene.
Maybe they've found evidence of a non-NYPD gun being fired at last week's scene.
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Good luck. may as well check the hudson river for pieces while they are at it if that were the case. I have yet to hear a report tho that any weapons other than the police officers was discharged at the scene.
It will be interesting if a 4th person is actually identified.
Now they are busy arresting people who may be witnesses to the incident. There probably won't be any witnesses who are not deserving of being arrested. Being arrested will help jog the witnesses memories in beneficial fashion, I guess.
"Being arrested will help jog the witnesses memories in beneficial fashion, I guess."
I think you broke the code!
seems like this would have been a good time for the cop to show his badge and break up the argument, rather than waiting for situation to deteriorate.
LOL.
Darn right, and, hey, why stop at 50?
What I read is that the officer whom they tried to run down fired 11 shots; and that one other guy fired 31 (which I make to be one "in the pipe", the magazine, and a second magazine. I don't know what weapons they carry undercover in the NYPD, so that limits the ability to imaginatively reconstruct what happened. But my duty Glock holds one in the pipe and 15 in the magazine.) So that's 42, leaving 8 shots to be divided up among the other three.
I know that 50 unanswered shots looks just terrible. But I also know what it feels like when you have the distinct impression that, "Hey! those guys in the car are tyring to kill me! Darn!"
What I'd love to know is how many shots the guy who fired 31 REMEMBERS firing. Adrenaline is powerful stuff, and "the literature" is rife with anecdotes (okay, maybe not exactly rife, but there are a lot of 'em) of guys who will say,"I don't know, I maybe shot two or three times," and are thunderstruck when somebody shows them the magazine(s) they ejected.
And this BS about "three shots and then assess" is, well, BS when it comes to cars running around and bumping into people and things and people talking, whether truthfully or merely boastfully, about "Yo, get the gun".
"Take cover and get the license," sounds like a good response if the person suggesting it is sitting at a desk in an office (or in his PJs at a computer in the den.) But if a car pointing right at you says,"Vroom, vroom, squeal, roar," there's going to be a powerful inclination to respond with "Police! Show me your hands!" followed, if the car doesn't stop, with, "Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, ..." I don't care what your training and departmental SOP on the use of force is.
A friend of mine once remarked, while picking shards of window glass out of his bloody arm, "I was REALLY tempted to hurt the guy."
That's what I mean. Once folks who have been making threatening talk about guns begin to tangle, things get interesting, unpredictable, and hard to control. This isn't like a battle where there are cover and lines of retreat and all. This is street fighting. The intention to avoid ending your shift on a slab at the morgue leads to actions which look rash to people not currently undergoing to vehicular assault.
These days, after having responded to an assault with a deadly weapon, your actions are judged and analyzed by people who have never once come close to peeing in their pants or come to the dreadful realization that, "Woah! That sumbidge is trying to kill me, and I have no time to back up and no place to back up to," who have never had to improvise in such a situation. One is compared to Chuck Norris or Barney Fife, and none of the comparisons are reasonable, much less complimentary.
I am with you on this. Professionalism requires that people behave professionally. Someone who can not control or as you suggest even remember what they did in a tense situation certainly is in the wrong business and at the least will have to be fired.
I generally agree, but here's what bothers me (from the article):
" Through his lawyer, the detective has insisted that he clearly identified himself as a police officer as he tried to stop them. He also has said he spotted Joseph Guzman, then sitting in the passenger seat, make a sudden move for his waistband before he and four other officers opened fire."
The detective and the other cops opened fire only after the car hit the detective and then smashed into the undercover van, not once, but twice. I don't believe for a second that the detective saw Guzman, who was a passenger in the car, reach into his waistband. In order for him to see Guzman's waistband while Guzman was sitting in the passenger seat, the detective would have had to have been on the hood of the car looking down over the dash or looking into the car through a side window from a position so close that he could see over the door and down into the passenger area -- a feat nearly impossible given the fact that it was night, the car was moving, and the car had alreeady hit the detective and had smased into the undercover van, twice. I'm not saying that the shooting was unjustified, just don't lie about what happened.
This sounds good, but is simply an inhuman expectation. I recommend Artwohl and Christensen, Deadly Force Encounters, 1997 Paladin Press, Boulder and the first two chapters of Murray, Training at the Speed of Life, 2004, Armiger Publications, Gotha.
We're talking about what happens to most humans when they suddenly discover that it looks a lot like somebody is trying to go them grave harm. Current training does not give sufficient opportunity for officers to learn how to handle the adrenaline dump and other neuropsychiatric concomitants of deadly force encounters.
Many of us may have experienced some of these effects in mild stress situations. I know the the few times I've shot IDPA matches, my gun seemed a lot less loud than it usually does.
But in an insufficiently scientific survey of too small a sample (72 officers responding) of officers surviving deadly force encounters,
My impression is that we are just beginning to learn about what it's really like to be a cop. And while we learn a lot of people are making ignorant and uninformed remarks becuase judging others is pleasant. Unfortunately a lot of cops are being mocked, sude, disciplined, and fired by people who do not know for example, that the Force Science Research Center exists or that it has shown pretty persuasively that it is entirely possilbe for a target to turn his back in the interval between when the irrevocable decision to pull the trigger has been made and when the bullet leaves the weapon. So cops are accused of shooting someone in the back when the fact is that that someone changed his mind a millisecond too late.
Yeah, that's not as fun as punishing cops. Reality is SO frustrating.
NY Post and NYT articles put the detective on the hood. Check other threads on FR for the links.
"Being arrested will help jog the witnesses memories in beneficial fashion, I guess."
Past reliable sources inform me that there has been a run on toilet plunger sales in Brooklyn. ;-)
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