article from
during the trial
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Officer Says Bronx Woman Didn’t Swing Bat Before Being Shot
By
JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.FEB. 5, 2018
Photo
Sgt. Hugh Barry, at right, is on trial in the Bronx, charged with murder in the death of a 66-year-old mentally ill woman killed in her apartment in a 2016 confrontation with the police. Credit Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times
A police officer who saw a sergeant fatally shoot a mentally ill woman in her Bronx apartment testified on Monday that the woman never swung a baseball bat she held in her hands at the sergeant, as he later asserted.
The officer, Camilo Rosario, was next to Sgt. Hugh Barry when he fired twice at Deborah Danner, 66, in her apartment on Oct. 18, 2016. Officer Rosario was the only one of the five officers present who had a clear view of the fatal encounter, according to the testimony of the other officers.
Sergeant Barry, 31, was indicted last year on several charges, including murder, and is on trial in State Supreme Court in the Bronx.
Moments before Ms. Danner was shot, Officer Rosario said, Sergeant Barry decided to take her into custody after she refused to drop a pair of scissors. She was threatening to fight the police if they entered her bedroom, where she sat on her bed.
The officer said Sergeant Barry had one foot in the room and was standing in the doorway, his back to the hinges, when Ms. Danner reached to her right and grabbed a 32-inch bat, which she raised up to her shoulder, waggling the end as if getting ready to hit something.
Sergeant Barry drew his pistol and ordered her to “drop it, drop the bat please, ma’am,” Officer Rosario said. Then Ms. Danner stood and took a step toward Sergeant Barry with her left leg. He stood four to five feet away from her.
“At any point did she swing?” the lead prosecutor, Wanda Perez-Maldonado, asked. “No,” the officer replied. “At any point did she try to hit Sergeant Barry in the head?” the prosecutor said. “No,” said Officer Rosario.
The question of whether Sergeant Barry had reason to fear for his life is at the heart of the defense, and the testimony of Officer Rosario, who is to be cross-examined on Tuesday, contradicted the opening statement from Sergeant Barry’s lawyer, who said Ms. Danner was swinging hard at the sergeant’s head when he fired.
But Officer Rosario’s testimony was also at odds with some of the testimony of the emergency medical technicians who were in the apartment and who said Sergeant Barry did not try to talk to Ms. Danner before moving in to subdue her.
Officer Rosario and the other four officers who testified said Sergeant Barry had spent a few minutes calmly trying to persuade Ms. Danner to lay down the scissors before he decided to forcibly take her into custody.
Ms. Danner was a paranoid schizophrenic woman who had been hospitalized at least 10 times. The police had been called twice before to her seventh-floor apartment at 630 Pugsley Avenue in the Castle Hill neighborhood to help emergency medical technicians take her to a hospital.
The trial has cast a spotlight on the protocols the police are supposed to follow when dealing with the mentally ill. The shooting of Ms. Danner drew condemnations from Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill, who said Sergeant Barry had not followed the department’s protocol for safely containing a distraught, mentally ill person.
One question facing the State Supreme Court justice trying the case, Robert A. Neary, is whether Sergeant Barry had exhausted other options for safely containing Ms. Danner, or should have waited for specially trained officers from the Emergency Service Unit to arrive. Sergeant Barry waived his right to a jury, opting for a bench trial. A grand jury charged him with murder, manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, each charge having slightly different elements.
Sergeant Barry’s lawyer, Andrew C. Quinn, said in his opening statement that his client had acted in self-defense. He has said Ms. Danner was swinging a bat at Sergeant Barry’s head with enough force to kill him and he was unable to retreat because of the officers behind him. Any mistakes the police made in handling the situation before that moment do not matter, since an officer, or any citizen, has a right to defend his own life with lethal force, Mr. Quinn has said.
Two emergency medical technicians and five police officers have testified over the last two days of trial, giving differing accounts of what happened. It is not unusual for witnesses to a shooting to remember things differently, though in this trial, some of the inconsistencies have been striking.
The medics, Britney Mullings and Patrick Moore, both testified that Ms. Mullings had gone into the apartment and was speaking with Ms. Danner, calming her down, when Sergeant Barry and his driver arrived. Both medics said that the sergeant had never spoken to Ms. Danner, and that the police had moved to subdue her while Ms. Mullings was still talking to her. Both remembered one of the officers saying “Ready!” before they moved as a group toward Ms. Danner’s bedroom.
But four of the officers who were present testified that the E.M.T.s had never entered the apartment.
Officer Rosario, who had initially taken the lead in talking to Ms. Danner, testified that Ms. Mullings did come into the apartment and tried for a time to cajole Ms. Danner into laying down the scissors. He said Ms. Danner had come out of her bedroom and was holding the scissors like a dagger when Ms. Mullings spoke to her.
But then, he said, the sergeant arrived and Ms. Mullings retreated to the front door of the apartment while Ms. Danner hurried back into her bedroom. Officer Rosario said he had explained to Sergeant Barry that Ms. Danner had the scissors and was refusing to go to the hospital. The sergeant nodded, said “O.K.,” and took over talking to Ms. Danner, who continued to insist that the police leave her apartment, he said.
Minutes later, however, he and Sergeant Barry conferred and decided “we are just going to have to go cuff her.” Then Sergeant Barry said: “Let’s go into the room.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 6, 2018, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Officer Says That Bronx Woman Didn’t Swing Bat Before Being Shot.
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