Prometheus 6

I refer you to the cops' first attempt to explain this disaster.

Lieutenant Napoli’s account makes clear that he believed the men in Mr. Bell’s car knew he was a police officer because he had made eye contact with one of them. The report says Lieutenant Napoli could not articulate why he believed that.

That's bizarre enough, but...

The sergeant, Michael Wheeler, later told investigators that both men appeared seriously injured and likely to die, according to the records. A plainclothes officer stood close by, his pistol still trained on the two men in the car. A third man lay on the street nearby.

Minutes later, the shooting scene on Liverpool Street in Jamaica, Queens, was choked with patrol cars and the scrum of officials that follows a police shooting. A captain ordered another uniformed sergeant, Donald Kipp, to locate and inspect the weapons of the men involved in the shooting. In all, five plainclothes officers had fired a total of 50 bullets.

But one after another, in conversations with Sergeant Kipp or Sergeant Wheeler, the men said they could not say how many shots they had fired. Two said they were unsure whether they had even fired at all, including a detective who investigators later learned had fired 31 shots, emptying his 9-millimeter Sig Sauer pistol, reloading and emptying it again during the frenzied barrage.

31 SHOTS AND A RELOAD, AND HE WASN"T SURE HE FIRED AT ALL. That's Detective "Undercover" Oliver.

I want to see how much of this makes it into the trial. The Times doesn't say they mentioned Lt. Napoli's telepathic powers at all.

Top Officer at Queens Club Testifies in Sean Bell Case
By MICHAEL WILSON

The group of police officers and detectives involved in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell outside a strip club in Queens had first planned to work elsewhere that night, but changed their plan when they could not find the drug dealer they wanted to arrest, the group’s commanding officer testified on Thursday.

The commanding officer, Lt. Gary Napoli, said the officers knew of a dealer, in the nearby 105th Precinct, whom they had been unable to arrest earlier. “My first thought was to try to pick up a lost subject,” he said in testimony in State Supreme Court in Queens. But the arrest was scuttled: “That individual we wanted to meet with was not available,” Lieutenant Napoli said.

The lieutenant’s testimony is of great interest in the trial of three detectives accused in the killing of Mr. Bell on Nov. 25, 2006, outside the Club Kalua, a topless bar in the 103rd Precinct, in Jamaica.

The detectives, Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper, were part of a group that confronted Mr. Bell and two of his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, on Liverpool Street around the corner from the club and, believing they were being shot at, fired 50 rounds at Mr. Bell’s car, killing him and wounding the two others.

Lieutenant Napoli was the highest-ranking officer on the scene at the time of the shooting, and is expected to describe the shift in the night’s focus from trying to buy drugs and solicit prostitutes to trying to make a gun arrest among Mr. Bell’s cohorts at his bachelor party when he resumes testifying on Friday. Prosecutors have called the operation disorganized and the officers incompetent.

Detectives Oliver and Isnora face charges of first- and second-degree manslaughter. Detective Cooper faces two misdemeanor charges of reckless endangerment.