MANHATTAN (CN) — Disappointing the weeping mother of a slain Guinean immigrant, a federal judge found no negligence or misconduct in the decision by New York City police to store key evidence in a waterside warehouse shortly before Hurricane Sandy.
“At every step of this, you could apply 20-20 hindsight,” U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel said Thursday at a hearing on Mohamed Bah, whose family has been reconstructing the 28-year-old’s death since his shooting on Sept. 25, 2012.
This much of the tragedy is undisputed: Police arrived at Bah’s home in response to a call from his mother, who was concerned about her son’s mental illness and depression. The mother, Hawa Bah, claims that she requested an ambulance, but the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit busted into the apartment without a warrant despite her protests.
The NYPD alleges that police fired 10 shots at Bah after he lunged at an officer with a knife, but the family denies that he threatened the officers in any way.
In the family’s telling, NYPD Officer Andrew Kress tried to subdue the emotionally disturbed Bah with the stun gun but instead hit Detective Edwin Mateo, who shouted out in confusion: “He’s stabbing me. Shoot him.”
Eight of those bullets struck and killed Bah.
Debra Cohen, an attorney for the Bah family, labeled the incident an “execution and a cover-up” in a 2015 interview with the Huffington Post.
Before gathering in Castel’s courtroom Thursday morning to probe the NYPD’s role in evidence destruction Thursday, Hawa Bah joined more than a dozen civil-rights activists, interfaith religious leaders and others outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan for a group prayer.
The daylong proceedings centered around Sgt. John Capozzi, who supervised the Kingsland Warehouse.
Capozzi testified that the NYPD lost roughly 1,100 barrels of biological evidence five years ago when Superstorm Sandy ravaged the Eastern Seaboard.
The NYPD still does not have a full accounting of what it has lost, the sergeant acknowledged during his cross-examination.
“To this day, here has been no attempt to inventory evidence left in the Kingsland Warehouse,” Cohen asked.
“No, ma’am,” he replied.
Kingsland Warehouse borders Newtown Creek, a polluted body of water dividing Brooklyn from Queens that is still recovering from contamination dating back to the days of the Standard Oil company.
During his efforts to document the destruction, Capozzi said that he wore a Tyvek suit to protect himself from the E. coli, chloroform and other contamination in the flooded Superfund site.