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Akai Gurley, 28, was unarmed when he was accidentally shot by a New York Police Department (NYPD) cop manning the apartment building in East New York where his girlfriend lived.
Akai Gurley's girlfriend has just come out of the block flanked by assemblyman Charles Barron pic.twitter.com/HO6YbPmq1M
— Oliver Laughland (@oliverlaughland) November 21, 2014
Bill Bratton said at a press conference on Friday that the unarmed 28-year-old, identified as Akai Gurley, was shot in the chest in the Louis H. Pink Houses, a housing project in Brooklyn, at around 11:15 pm (0400 GMT) on Thursday.
Gurley was shot after he entered a stairwell at the site where two rookie officers were on duty for a routine interior patrol of the apartment building.
Bratton said the victim was a “total innocent,” adding the case was being investigated by New York police and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.
“What happened last night was a very unfortunate tragedy,” he said. “It appears that this may in fact have been an accidental discharge.”
The building’s seventh and eighth floors were said to have been almost dark at the time of the incident, but the officers were equipped with flashlights.
“This is an outrage. We are angry, there’s no way, no way a young man in a stairwell with two heavily armed police officers, and he’s unarmed, should be dead. This is madness, it must stop. People are outraged. This is happening all over the country,” said former Brooklyn councilman Charles Barron.
Agencies/Canadajournal
