Sean Bell Tribute

Fifteen months to the day after Sean Bell was killed in a blast of 50 police bullets, and after rounds and rounds of court hearings, motions and countermotions, the trial of three of the officers who fired their handguns that cold morning began Monday in State Supreme Court in Queens. The proceedings began with a quick start at two minutes before 9 a.m. and kept a brisk pace all day.

Prosecutors went first, describing the detectives as a careless and incompetent group run amok the morning of Nov. 25, 2006, unorganized and desperate for an arrest as their nightclub detail was coming to a close. “The story of how this tragedy occurred is a tale of carelessness,” said Charles A. Testagrossa, an assistant district attorney, adding that the shooting “can only be characterized as criminal.”

Defense lawyers argued that Mr. Bell’s actions that morning led the detectives to believe themselves at deadly risk and provoked a shooting both justified and reasonable. One lawyer went a step further, implying that Mr. Bell’s actions were motivated by racial stereotype, and he described his client, Detective Gescard F. Isnora, as a hard-working black man whose actions were misread that morning because of assumptions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/nyregion/26bell.html?ex=1361682000&en=dab46b58cd24f936&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Hours before he was to be married, a man leaving his bachelor party at a strip club in Queens that was under police surveillance was shot and killed early yesterday in a hail of police bullets, witnesses and the police said. Two of his friends were wounded, one critically, they said.

Many details of the shooting were not immediately clear, but relatives of the dead man, Sean Bell, 23, and community leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, demanded an investigation into what some called an overreaction by officers that killed a man on his wedding day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/nyregion/26cops.html