New York Officer Charged in Akai Gurley’s Fatal Shooting Goes on Trial
from The New York Times – January 25, 2016
Officer Peter Liang, who faces charges in the 2014 shooting death of Akai Gurley, leaving State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on Monday. Credit Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times
At about 11 o’clock on the night of Nov. 20, 2014, Melissa Lopez was in her kitchen in the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York. Her partner was getting ready for his workday, which started at midnight, and her two girls were in their rooms.
She heard a single gunshot from the stairwell, which was next to her apartment. A couple of minutes later there was a knock at her apartment door.
“I paused for a second; me and my husband looked at each other,” she testified Monday in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. When she looked through the peephole, she saw a woman she knew from the building, Melissa Butler.
…
“Akai Gurley is dead today because he crossed paths with Peter Liang, who is sitting here,” Marc J. Fliedner, a prosecutor who is the chief of the civil rights bureau at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, said in his opening statement, which at one point found him on his knees, demonstrating how Ms. Butler had bent over Mr. Gurley’s body.
