The rookie cop who accidentally shot and killed an unarmed man in a Brooklyn housing-project stairwell sobbed in court on Monday as he recounted the chaotic minutes after his gun “just went off” — but he never said he was sorry an innocent man wound up dead.
“I heard someone crying,” Officer Peter Liang recalled, his voice quivering on the stand in Brooklyn Supreme Court, where he is on trial for the death of Akai Gurley, 28.
“I ran down one flight, and I didn’t see anyone, so I kept running and then I saw Mr. Gurley. I said, ‘Oh, my God, someone’s been hit!’ ”
As Liang, also 28, described how he then radioed for an ambulance, he began weeping, holding his head in his hands. He was given a minute-long break to compose himself.
“When I got there, I bent over and looked at him,” Liang continued. “He looked like he was seriously injured. His eyes were rolled back. He was just laying there, very still.”
He didn’t start performing CPR on Gurley, he told jurors, because he thought he should wait for “professional medical help.”
“I was panicking,” Liang said. “I was in shock, in disbelief, that someone actually was hit.”
Liang was patrolling a dark stairwell at the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York with his gun drawn in November 2014 when he accidentally fired one round while approaching the door to the roof.
The bullet ricocheted off the wall and struck Gurley, who was on the landing below with his girlfriend.
Prosecutors say that Liang was acting recklessly, with his gun drawn and his finger on the trigger, and that he did not immediately call for an ambulance or administer CPR.
He’s on trial for manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, among other lesser charges.
On the stand, Liang insisted that his finger wasn’t on the trigger, but that he was startled by a “quick sound” coming from his left in the stairwell.
“The gun just went off after I tensed up,” Liang said.
In his one hour and 49 minutes on the stand, Liang did not offer an apology, nor was he prompted to by either his own lawyer or under cross-examination by the prosecutor.
Gurley’s mom, Sylvia Palmer, who watched the testimony with several family members, was disturbed by Liang’s lack of contrition.
“Peter Liang showed no remorse at all, and he has not apologized,” she said after court.
“I think by now he should have apologized . . . If he had only apologized, I would have believed it was an accident. He shows no remorse.”
Lawyer Edward Hayes, who represented Kenneth Boss, one of the NYPD cops involved in the police shooting death of Amadou Diallo in 1999, agreed Liang should have tried to atone for his fatal blunder.
“He should have started saying I’m sorry as soon as he got on the stand,” Hayes told The Post. “You have to be sorry, and you have to tell the family you’re sorry.”
At the very least, he should have been remorseful, civil-rights lawyer Ron Kuby agreed.
“Usually, when you’re on trial for killing somebody — especially someone you’ve admitted you killed — it’s a good tactic to at least pretend you’re sad about killing that innocent person,” he told The Post.
During his testimony, Liang sought to explain why he had his gun drawn, saying he had performed “close to a thousand” vertical patrols in his first year on the job and sometimes held his weapon when he felt unsafe.
“There are bullet holes in the roof. There’s remnants of drugs, drug dealing,” he explained.
“People get assaulted and raped in these areas, so at times I would take the gun out.”
It was “pitch black” when he entered the stairwell, Liang said.
“I took my flashlight out, and weapon out,” he said, adding his trigger finger was “along the side of the weapon, along the frame.”
“This is how I always do it . . . and there’s never been a problem.”
“Whenever we feel unsafe, it is our discretion to take out our firearm . . . There was no set rule.”
Reaffirming what his partner, Shaun Landau, testified to last week, Liang said that he was only “sort of” trained in CPR while at the Police Academy despite being certified and that his instructors gave away test answers.
“I didn’t really spend any time with the dummy. There were a lot of people in the class,” he said.
Gurley’s girlfriend, Melissa Butler, attempted to perform CPR while Landau and Liang stood by.
During cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney Joseph Alexis challenged Liang’s claim that he didn’t feel qualified to try to save the man he had shot.
“Between you and Melissa Butler, who do you think was in a better position to help?” he asked.
“I don’t know what she does for a living. I can’t give an answer,” Liang replied.
When Alexis noted Butler was receiving CPR instructions from a neighbor, Liang simply said, “I didn’t know if I could do it better than her.”
The prosecutor also grilled him on why he attempted to call his sergeant on a cellphone instead of radioing in the gunshot.
“I didn’t want to alarm the other officers . . . because it wasn’t a crime that happened,” Liang said, recalling the minutes before he and Landau discovered a man had been shot.
“You don’t want other officers flooding the building, and leaving a post unattended, because you know when they hear ‘shots fired,’ they come quickly.”
“‘I can handle this through my cellphone,’ that was my thought process during that time,” he said.
Both sides rested Monday. The case will go to the jury after closing arguments Tuesday.