Sean Bell died at the hands of bumbling, trigger-happy cops, who handled their job with “carelessness verging on incompetence,” a Queens prosecutor said yesterday as the sensational 50-shot trial got under way.
The defense responded by telling the judge that Bell was drunk and acting “out of control” and that the officers did what they had to do to protect themselves in the early hours of Nov. 25, 2006.
“It will be clear that what happened cannot be explained away as a mere accident or mistake,” Assistant District Attorney Charles Testagrossa said of the cops who fired 50 shots at an unarmed Bell and his friends.
The prosecutor criticized the NYPD’s vice operation at the Queens strip club where Bell’s bachelor party was held as “haphazard at best” and described the cops as eager to find cause to shut down the place.
Detectives Gescard Isnora and Michael Oliver are charged with manslaughter, while Detective Marc Cooper is on trial for reckless endangerment in the shooting, which sparked debate about police misconduct and the use of excessive force.
Testagrossa said Isnora, who squeezed off 11 shots, did not display his badge in a clear way and should have waited for backup in the moments leading up to the shooting.
Anthony Ricco, representing Isnora, countered that Bell had had too much to drink and was “out of control” when he left the Kalua strip club in Jamaica with his friends Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield.
“When there is a confluence of alcohol and ignorance, there’s always a tragedy,” Ricco told Supreme Court Justice Arthur Cooperman in a courtroom packed with Bell’s family and members of the NYPD.
Cooperman alone will decide the fate of the three detectives, who opted for a nonjury trial.
Ricco also said patrons inside the club saw and heard Bell trade insults with another man, then heard Guzman tell someone, “Go get my gat” – slang for gun.
Once outside, Ricco said Bell, at Guzman’s urging, tried “to run over” Isnora – though, by then, he had identified himself as a cop. He described the vehicle as “a deadly weapon” and “a human battering ram.”
“You have to take all the politics out to look at the evidence,” Ricco said. “He thought Guzman was reaching for a gun.”
Before the shooting, none of the three detectives on trial had ever fired a gun in the line of duty.
Testagrossa was highly critical of Oliver, who fired 31 of the 50 shots. He said the cop would have realized there was no threat had he “paused to reassess” before reloading his semiautomatic pistol with a 15-bullet clip.
It was one of Oliver’s bullets that killed Bell.
But defense lawyer James Culleton said it took as little as nine seconds for Oliver to fire the 31 rounds, leaving him no time to reconsider what was happening around him.
He said Oliver will testify that during the chaos, he saw Guzman lift his arms and that Isnora shouted, “He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!”
Culleton said Oliver was convinced that had he hesitated for even a second, “He’d be looking down the barrel of a gun. He’d be a dead man.”
Yet investigators never recovered any gun.
“While, clearly, this was a tragedy, no crime was committed,” Culleton said. “Deadly physical force was necessary because deadly physical force was being used against them.”
The first emotional moment of the trial came after opening arguments wrapped up, when Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre-Bell, described from the witness stand the first time she saw him after the shooting.
“He was in the morgue,” she said softly, clutching a white handkerchief as she wept.
She also said the impromptu bachelor party had been “a last-minute thing.” They were to be married later that day.
Two days later, she said, she was asked to make a formal identification of the body from a photograph at the Medical Examiner’s Office.
Paultre-Bell, wearing a black dress, was able to maintain her composure as she talked about how she and Bell met in high school and about their two daughters, Jada, 5, and Jordyn, 1.
She told the judge that Bell, 23, had her nickname, Coli, tattooed over his heart.
Defense lawyers chose not to cross-examine her.