The officer who shot the victim is Sgt. Hugh Barry, an 8 year veteran of the NYPD. The victim is Deborah Danner, a mentally ill woman that the police were already aware of from having had calls about her before. At the time of this article, the names were not being released, but have been since then.
Why didn't he just use his Taser on her? Initially she had a scissors, which in my mind would be a lot more dangerous than a bat, and he was able to talk her into putting it down. Then she picks up a bat and swings so he shoots her? What imminent danger was he in? Here we have a trained police officer up against a mentally ill but still able to be talked to 66 year old woman; he couldn't just grab the bat from her? Oh no, that's right, he had to hold on to his gun with one hand, after all, he was in fear for his life from this woman that he had just talked into putting down the scissors!
Police Cite Self-Defense as Sergeant Fatally Shoots Bronx Woman, 66
 |
| Deborah Danner |
A police sergeant responding to a call about a 66-year-old woman
acting irrationally in a Bronx apartment fatally shot her after she tried
to hit him with a baseball bat on Tuesday, the police said.
Officers
went to a seventh-floor apartment at 630 Pugsley Avenue in the Castle Hill
neighborhood a little after 6 p.m. in response to a neighbor’s complaint, the
police said.
About 10
minutes later, the sergeant entered the apartment and found the woman, who was
alone, in a bedroom holding a pair of scissors, Assistant Chief Larry W.
Nikunen, commanding officer of patrol for the Bronx, said at a news conference.
The
sergeant persuaded the woman to drop the scissors, but she then grabbed a
baseball bat. As she tried to hit him, the sergeant fired twice and struck her
in the torso, Chief Nikunen said. She was pronounced dead at Jacobi Medical
Center.
The chief
said there had been “several incidents involving this individual with similar
types of calls” in the past, but he did not have details of the previous calls.
The names
of the sergeant, whom Chief Nikunen said was an eight-year veteran of the New York Police Department, and the woman were
not released. The chief said the sergeant had a Taser,
which was not used. Why it was not used will be part of an investigation.
In a statement, the Bronx borough president,
Ruben Diaz Jr., called the shooting “an outrage,” noting that the police were
aware of the woman’s history and that the sergeant had a stun gun. He called on
Eric T. Schneiderman, the state attorney general, and Darcel D. Clark, the
Bronx district attorney, to investigate.
“While I
certainly understand the hard work that our police officers undertake to keep
the streets of our city safe every single day, I also know what excessive force
looks like,” Mr. Diaz said in the statement.
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