The shooting of a Brooklyn teen cops believed was brandishing a gun – but who was carrying only a hairbrush – appeared to fall “within department guidelines,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday
“As we know the facts now, this shooting appears to be within department guidelines as they faced someone they reasonably believed was about to use deadly physical force,” Kelly said.
Khiel Coppin, 18, was shot 10 times in a hail of 20 bullets Monday when police responded to his Bedford-Stuyvesant home after receiving a 911 call from his mother, in which the teen was heard cursing in the background and saying he had a gun.
“I’ve got a [expletive] gun,” Coppin said, according to the 911 transcript.
The violence unfolded when Coppin’s mother, Denise Owens, called for help just after 7 p.m. because she feared her son – who had a history of mental problems and took anti-depressants and anti-psychotic medications – might try to hurt her or himself, police said.
“I’m prepared to die,” he allegedly told his mother before she called cops.
Coppin had an extensive juvenile record, including multiple arrests for armed robbery and assault dating to when he was 15. He served at least one stint in a juvenile facility upstate.
“This kid is a problem. You can even hear him,” his mother told the 911 operator.
“Who is that?” the operator asked.
“That’s supposed to be my son!” Owens responded.
“I’ve got a [expletive] gun!” the teen screamed in the background.
But minutes later, Owens told a police operator in a second call that her son did not have a gun.
“He does not . . . hmm . . . Who says . . . he does not have a firearm,” she said, according to a second transcript released by police.
Kelly laid out details of the evening – including the recordings of the 911 calls – in an extensive press briefing, aimed at quelling public anger at the shooting.
But Paul Wooten, an attorney for Coppin’s family, called Kelly’s explanation “very disappointing.”
“The police commissioner has decided to rush to judgment. Somehow, within 24 hours of this tremendous tragedy, this egregious act, they have decided it was within department guidelines,” he said. “There are very, very few facts that are actually clear. We hope we get a fair and just investigation by the District Attorney’s Office and the Police Department.”
When police arrived at the family’s first-floor apartment at 590 Gates Ave., Coppin barricaded himself inside a bedroom, officials said.
“He’s going to kill us,” sources said Owens told the responding officers, who evacuated the mother from the apartment and huddled for safety behind furniture and tried to talk Coppin into coming out and surrendering peacefully.
But Coppin just taunted them and periodically cracked the door open, and the officers saw him holding two butcher’s knives, sources said.
Then, as the ranking officer on the scene, Capt. Charles McEvoy, called for a hostage-negotiation unit, Coppin hopped out of the bedroom window and into a courtyard.
As he walked out onto Gates Avenue, he encountered five cops: two officers and a sergeant from the housing unit, and a detective and sergeant from the 79th Precinct.
The officers repeatedly told Coppin, “Stop! Lay down! Show us your hands!” but “he was ignoring multiple, continuous orders to stop,” Kelly said.
Police said Coppin kept coming toward them and then reached beneath his gray hooded sweatshirt in a manner that made them believe he was about to pull out a gun. They opened fire.
But Coppin was not carrying a gun, and had only an 8-inch hairbrush in his hands.
The two officers fired six and four shots, the sergeants fired four and five, and the detective fired only once, police sources said.
Coppin was struck in the chest, right hip, left forearm, and seven times in both legs. He was taken to Woodhull Hospital, where he died.
Investigators found four pieces of paper containing rambling writings in Coppin’s pocket.
“Happyness [sic] is sadness,” read part of one, in which sadness is crossed out and replaced with the word “death.”
“Those closest 2 death iz closer to happyness [sic]. Truly that’s why more bums smile than millionaires,” read another. “The devil tried 2 get me.”
Additional reporting by Larry Celona, Murray Weiss and Lukas I. Alpert