Akai Gurley

The Brooklyn district attorney said on Friday that he planned to impanel a grand jury to look into the death of Akai Gurley, an unarmed Brooklyn man who was killed last month by a police officer patrolling a public-housing unit.

With protests continuing over the grand jury decisions not to charge the officers who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the tension around the Gurley case has also risen. Mr. Gurley was black, as were Mr. Garner and Mr. Brown. The officers in the Garner and Brown cases are white; the officer who shot Mr. Gurley, Peter Liang, is Asian-American.

The district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, said in a statement that he did not support the appointment of an independent prosecutor to handle the case, saying he had been elected by Brooklyn’s residents to represent their interests. “It is important to get to the bottom of what happened,” he said.

Mr. Thompson added, at an event on Friday, that prosecutors had not completed their investigation, so the timing for the grand jury was not yet clear.

Mr. Thompson has not said what charge or charges he might ask the grand jury to consider.

Mr. Gurley, 28, was killed Nov. 20 as he walked in a dark stairwell in the Louis H. Pink Houses in the East New York neighborhood, his girlfriend at his side. The elevators in the building often malfunctioned and residents often used the stairs instead, even though the lights in the stairwells were frequently out, as they were that night.

Officer Liang, 27, was conducting a so-called vertical patrol with his partner, starting on the roof and heading down through the stairwells, a common procedure for officers assigned to housing projects. Officer Liang had his gun out and opened the door to a stairwell; the gun went off, authorities said, as Mr. Gurley entered the stairwell one floor below.

The police commissioner, William J. Bratton, characterized the shooting as “an unfortunate accident.”

While there were immediate calls for criminal charges for the officers who killed Mr. Garner and Mr. Brown, opinions about the Gurley case were varied. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who called for protests in the earlier cases, said he “didn’t know” whether an indictment was appropriate for Officer Liang.

“There has to be a full investigation,” Mr. Sharpton said, cautioning that supporters of the officer “should not rush to judgment and say it is an accident when they don’t know what happened.”

United States Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn, said Mr. Thompson’s decision was “a meaningful step in the right direction.”

“Akai Gurley did not deserve to die,” he said, “and the evidence of a kill shot that penetrated his chest and struck him in the heart suggests something more than a noncriminal accident.”

A similar shooting occurred in January 2004, when Timothy Stansbury Jr., 19, was killed on a roof at the Louis Armstrong Houses in Brooklyn byOfficer Richard S. Neri Jr. A grand jury declined to indict Officer Neri after he testified that he had unintentionally discharged his weapon after Mr. Stansbury pushed open a rooftop door, startling him.

Given what is known about the Gurley case, said Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who directs its Center on Race, Crime and Justice, it seemed likely that a jury would consider criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment charges.

A central question for the grand jury to consider, Professor Jones-Brown said, is “what police are trained and authorized to do in these kinds of situations.” If the police action goes against training and police guidelines, the next step would be to determine how much of the officer’s behavior had diverged from “the kind of care he should’ve been exercising,” she said.

The investigation into the shooting so far has covered the first minutes after the officer shot Mr. Gurley, a law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about an ongoing case. Mr. Liang may have used his phone to send a text message during that period, the source said, The Daily News reported on Friday.

James P. O’Neill, chief of department and the highest ranking uniformed officer in the Police Department, declined to comment on Officer Liang’s actions.

“This is an ongoing investigation by our department and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office,” Chief O’Neill said. “I really can’t talk about it.”

The Daily News suggested that Officer Liang was texting a representative of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, although a spokesman for the union said that account did “not appear to be true.” Nonetheless, one police official said, it was not unusual for an on-duty officer to seek guidance from a union representative after firing a gun.

Mr. Jeffries said that in the Gurley case, he hoped a grand jury would vote for an indictment.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean a conviction, but it should mean an indictment that allows the facts to be aired in a public trial,” he said. “When unarmed black men are killed by police officers, we need public trials to help restore confidence in the criminal justice system.”（source: The New York Times）