Jennifer Danner (2nd from right) the sister of police-shooting victim Deborah Danner, spoke outside her sister’s apartment building after NYPD Sgt. Hugh Barry shot and killed the 66-year-old woman who was wielding a bat in her building last night. (JAMES KEIVOM/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)
NEW YORK (AP) — A police officer who fatally shot a mentally ill woman in her New York apartment in 2016 after she brandished scissors and a bat was acquitted by a judge Thursday.
New York Police Department Sgt. Hugh Barry was found not guilty of murder, manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in the death of Deborah Danner.
Defense attorney Andrew Quinn said “we’ve always felt confident we would win but you never know” until the verdict is announced.
The October 2016 shooting earlier drew rare rebukes from New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill and Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said “something went horribly wrong here.”
Officers had been called to the Bronx home of Danner, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, several times before.
Barry testified that he persuaded Danner to put down the scissors and then tried to grab her before she had a chance to pick them up again.
“She was too fast for me,” Barry said. “The last thing I want was for her to go into the room and get the scissors.”
Barry said he drew his gun and pleaded with her to drop the bat, but she stepped toward him. He said he could not back up because five other officers were crowded close behind him.
“I just see the bat swinging and that’s when I fired,” he said. “I’m looking at this bat that can crack me in the head and kill me.”
O’Neill said at the time that his department had “failed” by not subduing Danner without resorting to deadly force.
“That’s not how it’s supposed to go,” O’Neill said. “It’s not how we train; our first obligation is to preserve life, not to take a life when it can be avoided.”
De Blasio said officers are only supposed to use deadly force when “faced with a dire situation” and then “it’s very hard to see that the standard was met.”
Prosecutors said Danner’s death resulted from numerous failures by the eight-year department veteran.
“He failed in his training,” Assistant District Attorney Newton Mendys said in opening statements. “He failed to listen to Mrs. Danner. …He failed to grasp the actions of a mentally ill woman.”
Sgt. Ed Mullins, head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said on Twitter after the verdict that he offers his “empathy and sympathy” to Danner’s family. But he said he was outraged “for the malicious prosecution that was conducted for the most nefarious of reasons.”
The death of Danner, who was black, at the hands of Barry, who is white, invited comparisons to the 1984 police killing of another black Bronx woman, Eleanor Bumpurs, who was shot after waving a knife at officers.
