Explain This Bruh
In Brooklyn, 2 Young Men, a Dark Stairwell and a Gunshot
By J. DAVID GOODMANNOV. 23, 2014
For two flights down a darkened Brooklyn stairwell, Akai Gurley descended, mortally wounded by gunfire but apparently unaware that the single shot had come from a police officer’s 9 millimeter weapon.
A few paces down and fleeing the boom of gunfire, his girlfriend, Melissa Butler, turned when she no longer heard him behind her, according to an account provided by a senior police official who was briefed by investigators. Retracing her steps, she found Mr. Gurley, 28, near the fifth-floor landing and rushed to a family friend on the fourth floor of the housing project to call 911.
“My neighbor says her boyfriend has been shot,” the friend told the dispatcher, according to the police official, who had viewed the call logs. “Call the cops.”
Upstairs, two officers already knew who had fired the shot. A gun in the hand of one young officer, Peter Liang, had gone off one time, the round flying — and possibly ricocheting — down the dark, cinder-block stairway.
Within hours of the shooting late Thursday night, the Police Department had conceded a grave error. The mayor and William J. Bratton, the police commissioner, visited the family home on Friday to apologize. The following day, protesters assembled outside the 75th Precinct station house in the East New York. And community leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, drew parallels to the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Missouri, and the killing of Eric Garner by police on Staten Island.
The shooting focused scrutiny on everyday tactics used by officers in housing projects, where rooting out entrenched violence has been a departmental priority, even as basic questions about the death remained unanswered: Had Officer Liang, surprised by a figure in the shadows below, reflexively squeezed the trigger, or had he merely lost his grip as he opened the door to the stairs?
“The cop who was standing behind Officer Liang doesn’t know what happened; the girlfriend doesn’t know what happened,” said the official. “There is a distinct possibility that Officer Liang doesn’t quite understand what happened.”
From different corners of Brooklyn, the lives of Mr. Gurley and Officer Liang, two young men separated in age by a single year, collided amid the faint shadows of the stairwell inside 2724 Linden Blvd., one of the buildings in the vast the Louis H. Pink housing project.
For Mr. Gurley, the stairs, even in their sorry state, offered the best alternative to chronically malfunctioning project elevators. For Officer Liang, their darkness presented a threat.
The fatal shooting, described as accidental by Commissioner Bratton, is the subject of investigations by the Police Department and the Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson. Officer Liang has not been interviewed yet by the police, which is standard in cases that could be presented to a grand jury.
Without talking to the officer involved, police officials said they could offer only theories as to what occurred in the stairwell.
What is known, police officials said, is that Officer Liang took out his service weapon before entering the unlit stairwell, a not-uncommon practice by officers patrolling inside the city’s housing projects. He held a flashlight. He opened the eighth-floor door, followed by his partner, also a relatively new officer and whose name has not been released. The gun went off as Mr. Gurley entered the landing one floor below, trailing his girlfriend.
Before the shooting, Mr. Gurley, had been on his way up in life, friends said. Childhood hopes of a music career were behind him, his good looks brought modeling work, and his determination had recently landed him something more steady after several months of searching: a job offer from the city housing authority.
He told friends that he was relieved to have a reliable paycheck to help provide for his 2-year-old daughter, Akaila, and her mother, Kimberly Michelle Ballinger.
“He was happy that he was about to go to work, he was relieved,” said Mr. Dente Crosby, 28, a friend of several years.
He was a familiar face around the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn where he lived with his daughter and her mother. Rose Quintana, 48, who lived in Mr. Gurley’s building there for six years, said she was on good terms with the mother of his daughter.
She added that a few years ago, the building was filthy and home to delinquents whom she worked with housing authority officials to oust. Though she did not know Mr. Gur
ley well, she appreciated him for never causing trouble.
“The problems that we had in this building was never that young man,” she said of Mr. Gurley.
Still, his life took him between two of New York City’s more dangerous pockets: his home in the Red Hook Houses and the Pink Houses in East New York where Ms. Butler lived. Mr. Gurley, known by his nickname “Bless,” had in recent years shied away from the streets, acquaintances said.
“He was getting it all together,” said a woman who knew Mr. Gurley but requested anonymity because she did not want to be connected to the case. “He was becoming an actor, he was going to school for modeling and he was going to work for the city,” she said.
The sort of patrol being conducted by Officer Liang and a partner, a so-called vertical patrol starts from the roof of a building and descends through its stairways, is considered essential to policing the projects. But they are seen by officers on daily patrol as among the most perilous assignments. Before starting one, officers radio special codes — 10-75V or 10-75I — to alert dispatchers in case anything happens.
The patrols became increasingly common over the summer as Commissioner Bratton flooded public housing with officers — many, like Mr. Liang, on overtime — to stem a rise in shootings. In the Pink Houses in East New York, recent gun violence, including two homicides, has drawn more officers.
Often the department’s least experienced officers are sent.
“This is a result of poor in-street field training; you literally had the blind leading the blind out there,” said another high-ranking police official.
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Both police officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the shooting investigation is still unfolding.
Early in his tenure, Commissioner Bratton promised to provide better guidance for rookie officers in high-crime neighborhoods, though the new program is not expected to start until January. Better training would not stop officers from drawing their weapons, the officials said, nor could it entirely prevent them from firing accidentally. In most years, the department logs about two dozen inadvertent gunshots, most during weapons maintenance. In 2012, a Bronx man died from what the police said was an accidental shooting after he collided with an officer responding to a robbery with his gun drawn.
On Sunday, a patrol car sat outside Officer Liang’s home in Bensonhurst. A neighbor who spoke to his family said Mr. Liang, 27, who lives with his parents, had barely left his room since the shooting. The neighbor, Fred Chan, 58, said his wife spoke to Mr. Liang’s mother late Saturday. She told him that Mr. Liang had barely eaten since the shooting. “Peter can’t stop thinking about what happens,” Mr. Chan said, relaying what he had been told about the conversation in Cantonese. “He would just say, ‘It was so dark. I was so scared.' ”
Yuri Castillo, 19, heard the shot from the stairwell, and minutes later heard Mr. Gurley’s girlfriend, Ms. Butler, weeping in the fourth floor stairwell.
