Hallway Firefight: The Amadou Diallo Shooting

American Handgunner, Nov, 2000 by Massad Ayoob

Situation: A furtive movement triggers a barrage of gunfire that puts four cops on trial for murder.

Lesson: A few shots with powerful ammo are more easily explained than many shots with "feeb loads."

It was a tragedy that gripped a nation. In a bizarre but later understandable chain of events, an incident happened in seconds that ruined the lives of four men and ended that of a fifth. Like a chain collision of five vehicles on a foggy night, it was an accident that involved all victims and no villains.

Feb. 4, 1999, approximately 12:40 a.m. Four plainclothes officers of the NYPD Street Crime Unit (SCU) rolled past the apartment building in the Bronx where Amadou Diallo, age 22, lived with a roommate. Officer Sean Carroll, in the front passenger seat of the unmarked Ford Taurus, spotted Diallo standing near the front door of the building in a "skulking" posture as if he didn't want to be spotted by the cops. Carroll told the driver, Officer Kenneth Boss, to stop and back up.

It occurred to Carroll that the man fit the description of a suspect who had savagely raped numerous black women in the area, and was known to wield a handgun. As the unmarked police sedan backed up, Officers Ed McMellon (right rear seat) and Richard Murphy (left rear) spotted Diallo. It occurred to them also that he was acting furtively and trying to avoid their gaze. McMellon in particular was reminded that "push-in" home invasions, common in New York, often involved lookouts. (A "push-in" begins with someone knocking on the victim's door. When it is opened from inside, the armed intruders force their way through. These officers knew of cases where victims of "push-ins" had been brutalized, raped, wounded or killed.)

As the Taurus came to a stop, Carroll and McMellon emerged and approached Diallo. The officers carried shields on chains or thongs around their necks and under their shirts. McMellon flipped his out and displayed it with his left hand, saying to Diallo in a conversational tone, "New York City Police. May we have a word with you, please?"

Diallo turned and ran for the door. The first two officers sprinted after him. Murphy was now approaching to assist. Boss had stayed behind the wheel to cut off any foot pursuit down the sidewalk, but seeing Diallo run toward the building, he jumped out of the car to help.

As the two closest officers were approaching him, they saw Diallo reaching to his right side, tugging in a movement that resembled to Carroll (on the right) a man pulling a gun from his coat pocket, and to McMellon (on the left), a man going for something at his hip. A black, square object emerged in Diallo's right hand as he began to turn clockwise toward the officers. Carroll yelled, "Gun! He's got a gun!"

McMellon cried, "What are you doing?" Both officers went for their own guns as the man whirled in their direction, the black object in his hand looking for all the world like the slide of a small blue steel automatic as it came up toward them, and almost simultaneously, they opened fire.

McMellon, instinctively backpedalling as he fired, fell off the steps. It looked to all three of the other officers as if he had been blasted backward and knocked down by gunshots. Carroll abandoned his two-handed Weaver stance to continue firing strong-hand only as he scuttled crab-wise down the steps, trying to get away from what he believed was murderous gunfire. Meanwhile, the fallen McMellon fired upward from the ground at the figure that was still thrusting the black object toward him. Seeing the same thing and fearing they were about to be shot down as they thought McMellon had been, the other two officers also opened fire.

Diallo slumped to the floor of the porch. The gunfire ceased. It had lasted no more than five seconds. Murphy and Boss rushed to McMellon to see how badly he was wounded. Carroll, the closest to the downed man, moved quickly forward to secure his weapon. To his horror, he found only a black nylon wallet.

You know the rest. The four officers were white. Diallo was a black man, a native of Guinea. The Bronx, and then the city, and then the nation expressed outrage. An unarmed black man had been shot by white officers, who had fired 41 shots.

At the end of January 2000, after a change of venue, a three-week trial began before the cameras of Court TV. The verdict of the mixed-race jury came as no surprise to criminal justice professionals, but shocked a nation conditioned by media and politicians to believe that a murderous act of racially motivated police brutality had taken place. The officers were found not guilty of all charges.

The trial of the four "Diallo cops" was educational for America, but there remain many unanswered questions and many misperceptions. There are lessons to be learned by cops, armed citizens and the general public. None is a new lesson. Each is supported by cases that have gone before.

So Many Bullets

Let's go over the most common questions that have arisen from the public and from media pundits in the wake of the trial.