Posted on 04/05/2018 9:19:32 AM PDT by Simon Green
Police fatally shot an unarmed man in Brooklyn on Wednesday after mistaking a metal pipe he was holding for a gun, authorities said. The death of Saheed Vassell, 34, provoked hours of emotionally charged protests.
About 4:40 p.m., police received three 911 calls reporting a black man in a brown jacket pointing what was “described as a silver firearm” at people on the street in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, said Terence Monahan, the New York Police Department’s chief of department.
Five officers — three in plainclothes and two in uniform — responded to the scene at Utica Avenue and Montgomery Street, Monahan said.
When they arrived, they saw Vassell “brandishing what appears to be a firearm, pointing it at people,” he said.
“The suspect then took a two-handed shooting stance and pointed an object at the approaching officers,” Monahan said.
Four of the officers opened fire on Vassell and struck him several times, police said. In all, three plainclothes officers and one uniformed officer fired 10 rounds between them, Monahan said.
According to Monahan, the officers immediately rendered medical aid to Vassell, who was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
Monahan held up an image of the scene captured seconds before the officers approached Vassell, and he said surveillance video along the street corroborated the officers’ account of what happened. None of the officers was wearing body cameras, he said.
The object that Vassell was holding wound up being “a metal pipe with some sort of knob on the end of it,” Monahan said.
Vassell lived just around the corner from where the shooting took place.
The shooting drew an angry crowd to the busy Crown Heights intersection to confront about a dozen additional police officers who had arrived at the scene.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
If you wield a fake gun like a real gun . . .
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
C’mon. I would think anyone pointing what’s described here at police would have a real good chance of being shot. What are the maniacs after? A world where police can’t use guns?
I would have shot him too.
Convenient that there’s no body camera footage.
Pictures is too grainy, but if that’s the guy from the article, I would have shot as well.
He was not “unarmed”, as the article seems to indicate, IMHO. Seems the other witnesses also thought he had a firearm.
Another martyr for the cause, it seems.
“The suspect then took a two-handed shooting stance and pointed an object at the approaching officers,”
JUSTIFIED!
I know I’m just a middle age, middle class, married male, just average, but in all my life I would NEVER point anything at a cop, anything. Who are these people, how dumb can you possibly be. I firmly believe they have a death wish, be it a phone, a pipe, a stick, you point it at a cop, and you will probably get shot. My guess is that the lack of a father figure at home and generations of victimization has led to an epidemic of stupid.
If my eyes had seen what that camera saw, I’d still be shooting that moron.
Suicide by cop?......................
Most NYPD officers don’t wear body cameras. You can do alot of damage with a metal pipe.
Also the radio run that came over was an “armed male”
I see you posted that photo from the NY Post. It is also on the Daily Mail.
Needless to say you did not find it on the Washington Post.
Such a propaganda rag is as useless to read or even click on as the Soviet era Pravda.
*DING!* *DING!* *DING!*
We have a winner!
Could have been a zip gun, too.
Unarmed my @$$!
If any of us robbed a bank pointing that “pipe” - you can bet your life we’d be charged with “armed robbery.” And the surveillance photo would be the evidence that guaranteed the conviction.
This shooting was 100% justifiable.
My only problem with it is that the same cops who carried out this shooting would probably arrest any private citizen who had responded the same way they did.
Don’t bring a pipe to a gun fight!
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