MOTHERS 911 CALL ENDS IN MENTALLY DISTURBED SONS DEATH

NEW YORK (Nov. 13) -- A young man was fatally shot last night in a hail of more than a dozen bullets fired by five police officers who responded to his mother’s 911 call for help in a domestic dispute in Brooklyn, the authorities said.

According to the police, another witness described Mr. Coppin as concealing the hairbrush under his shirt, pointing it outward.A restless crowd quickly gathered and grew to as many as 150, as some neighbors shouted protests against police brutality. "You need training — this is absurd!" one woman shouted out a window to the police. Another man pressed against a yellow crime-scene tape and said: "I’m not trying to start a riot. I’m just saying it’s not right."

The site and surrounding blocks were cordoned off as dozens of police officers, detectives and community affairs officers arrived to investigate the shooting and control the crowd. Community leaders at the scene included City Councilman Albert Vann.Witnesses and the police offered different details about how the shooting occurred.

Mr. Sanchez said that just before the shooting, he went outside and saw several officers there with guns drawn. Mr. Coppin approached the window, backed away, then returned and stood on the sill, Mr. Sanchez said. When an officer told him to get down, he jumped to the ground and started to go through a gate in the fence in front of the building, Mr. Sanchez said.An officer told Mr. Coppin to put up his hands, and when he did he dropped the hairbrush and the shooting began, although one officer called out to stop the gunfire, Mr. Sanchez said.Officers started chasing Mr. Sanchez and knocked him to the ground after, he said, he protested: "Why you got to shoot him like that, for nothing?"

A similar description of the shooting was given by Precious Blood, 16, who said she heard about 10 shots fired, most if not all by one officer. Another officer called out: "Stop, stop, stop shooting — he’s down," she said, but the shooter kept firing, "like he was playing with a toy."

The law enforcement official gave a different version of the encounter, saying that Mr. Coppin charged toward the officers and refused repeated orders to stop.

The police said they were also exploring the possibility that Mr. Coppin was trying to prompt a shooting, a phenomenon that a handful of studies in recent years have shown can account for a small fraction of police shootings in some American cities. One study by researchers at Harvard Medical School in 1998, for example, looked at all officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles County in a 10-year-period — about 430 shootings in all — and found that "suicide-by-cop" incidents accounted for 11 percent of the shootings over all and 13 percent of the fatal shootings.

Mr. Coppin’s mother was at the 79th Precinct station house last night and gave a statement to the police, they said.The five officers who fired all passed Breathalyzer tests, the law enforcement officials said.


By BRUCE LAMBERT and ANAHAD O’CONNOR,
The New York Times