Detective Tells of Fatal Shots Fired at Car (of Sean Bell)

[alp227]

Source: NY Times

Looking through the side window of Sean Bell’s crashed car, the detective grew alarmed as he saw a passenger reach for something. Then the man’s arm began to rise toward him. The detective said he surmised there was a gun at the end of that arm.

“I wasn’t going to wait for him to pull up, and, ‘Boom!’ ” the detective, Gescard F. Isnora, testified in a trial room at Police Headquarters on Wednesday. “I wasn’t going to wait for that. But me firing my weapon was the last thing I wanted to do.”

It was the first time that Detective Isnora publicly spoke of the early morning hours of Nov. 25, 2006, when he, three other detectives and an officer opened fire on a Nissan Altima outside Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens. Fifty shots were fired, killing Mr. Bell, who was to be married that day, and wounding two passengers.

Neither Mr. Bell nor his passengers had a gun. Criminal charges were brought against Detective Isnora and two other detectives; a judge acquitted them at a trial in which none of the three testified.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/nyregion/detective-tells-of-decision-to-fire-at-sean-bells-car.html