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After responding to a woman's 911 call about a domestic dispute with her son, the police fired between 13 and 20 times at the son, who claimed he had a gun. The gunfire killed 18-year-old Khiel Coppin and it turned out he was only holding a hairbrush.
Coppin had been arguing with his mother in their Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, and when police arrived, came out to the window ledge, "screaming and acting irrationally," according to the Daily News. A police source said, "Basically, it's suicide by cop." The police also say that Coppin's mother repeatedly said her son had a gun and that the five police officers said "Halt!" and Drop it!" to the teen.
Some witnesses agreed, saying they heard Coppin's mother say he had a gun, while some said Coppin had his hands up when he was shot. Andre Sanchez said he saw Coppin drop the hairbrush and that one officer yelled for the others to stop shooting; later, Sanchez claimed he saw one officer ask another, "Why did you shoot him?" Another witness, Precious Blood, told the Times that one officer kept shooting, in spite of shouts to stop.
Coppin was allegedly handcuffed after being shot and was pronounced dead at Woodhull Hospital. The Daily News adds that Coppin's mother had looked into psychiatric help for her son. All five police officers passed Breathalyzer tests.
Photograph of shooting scene by Gary He/AP
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Precious Blood?
Cops are like Pavlovian dogs, but much less intelligent...
That's too bad. Anyone know when the writers strike will be over? It'll really suck having to watch reruns.
hmmm...
do you losers care
or
is only carol ann gothbaum a tragedy???
straight out of the CYA handbook,
was the hairbrush handle shaped like a black power fist?
Oh nice. Since its not a Jewish chick from Manhattan, it doesn't matter right?
Whatever. This shit never happens in the suburbs.
This situation is sounding like someone very irrational getting shot.
In any case, my condolences to the family.
I'm not sure who I trust less. The police doing a CYA, or a witness named "Precious Blood"
Crispin Glover is 43 and dating a 21 year old. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwww.
A 'Domestic Dispute' between a Mother and her child? More like lack of discipline. You don't have 'Domestic Disputes' with your child, you punish them. This whole tragedy could have been avoided by being a decent parent. Another lesson you teach your children is 'Don't point anything at the NYPD. Especially if you're black. They hate that and will probably shoot you'.
That's nothing - what about Ann Nicole Smith and her 80yo sugar daddy..?
emilydickson- It seems that the mother tried to get psychiatric intervention the same day, but was unsuccessful. Therefore, the situation appears to be beyond decent parenting and more into the realm of mental illness.
crispin glover looks like the made over Wes anderson.
actually the tragedy was Stein's death if you read all her admirers here, guess mean people like to stick together.
The descriptions of how it happened are all over the map - he was either sticking the hairbrush out from under his shirt or he had already dropped it.
NYPD needs cameras on their guns, like in that Matt Damon movie.
Though I suppose, when you think about it, nobody who really wanted to threaten the police with a gun would tuck it under his shirt.
ok, so next time some out of control EDP is threatening his family, maybe they should call a social worker to sort it out.
And why the hell would the mother say he had a gun, if he didn't? Messed up.
that's what I would do and many others.
because that's straight out of the CYA playbook.
why would a mother say her son has a gun when he doesn't?
Does this happen anywhere else in the country? Does NYC have THE WORST trained police officers? This is what happens when the sanitation department requirements are more stringent.
II don't think it's fair to blame the cops yet. They were told he had a gun. Eyewitness accounts are wildly divergent. Let's wait for more information before jumping to conclusions.
trust precious blood, she always tells the truth.
my precious.
Maybe it was the band Most Precious Blood. They are from Brooklyn and play some brutal hardcore.
"Coppin's mother repeatedly said her son had a gun"
sounds like a bit of a head case herself. In any event, she behaved in a totally irresponsible manner under the circumstances.
You need to update the Newsmap - it reads "Shots fired at Cops"
Unless he was firing bristles from his brush, the only shots fired here were at an unarmed kid.
My heart goes out to the family. The fact that the mother repeatedly called a Psychiatric Center shows that she cared about her son's well-being. Unfortunately, a split decision was made by the cops and it turned out to be the wrong one. They need more training for these types of situations. Even more so, we need to start looking at our opinion and management of young black males who are angry or disenchanted with society.
Imagine if this happened in suburban, white America? Because a white kid doesn't fit the image of what most people think to be an angry, defiant, violent, youth, the entire community would be up in arms about it.
This shouldn't be the norm anywhere.
I give it a few hours before Al Sharpton's comments are posted - as if he is the voice of an entire race of people.
How the hell are the cops supposed to know it was a hairbrush? Are they psychic? It was at night and the kid (if we can even call him a kid at 18) had something in his hand. I bet if any of you were in the cops shoes you would've shot 50 times.
1.
Remember that, in most cases, news reports turn out to be WRONG and the cops turned out to have distorted facts to protect themselves.
(EX: white van in the DC sniper case? No such thing.)
(EX: Jessica Lynch, blonde american hero? Nope. Media and govt totally lied again.)
(EX: guy shot in London train station. Everything the cops said later proved a LIE.)
2.
Our laws are backwards. Any cop can kill ANY of you LEGALLY if they simply convince a judge they feared for their safety! That's nuts.
I think our BRAVE police must take a bullet before they shoot an innocent person. Duh, cops all wear bullet proof vests while few Diallos do.
When in doubt, the police must hold their fire. Better a cop dies by the hand of a criminal than an innocent civilian dies by the hand of a cop.
Will Gothamist call Bloomberg and Kerik, er, Kelly on this insanity?
Never.
3.
WHY can they shoot wild animals with tranquilizer guns but not humans?
Exactly.
Maybe this kid was an idiot or wanted to die, but we know for a fact that govern-media rarely reports the accurate truth.
GiulianiSCANDALS.blogspot.com
NOTE: by all accounts, the NYPD is the worst police dept on earth.
Which is precisely why our super-corrupt media insists on calling them the "Finest".
EX:
they fail to solve 80% of reported crime!
EX:
they fail to solve 50% of murders!
EX:
they fail to hit moving targets in 80% of gun tests!
And, as long as super-corrupt journalists keep calling super-failures "The Finest", the NYPD has NO MOTIVE TO IMPROVE.
Look for a big Gothamist article soon about how bad the NYPD is.
(I'm kidding, of course.)
"How the hell are the cops supposed to know it was a hairbrush?"
When it wasn't firing bullets maybe?
Countless witnesses not only heard one of the cops scream for them to stop shooting (which they didn't) but also saw Khiel drop the hairbrush, upon which the cops did not completely stop firing.
We do have to keep in mind however that even 20 shots fired happens in a matter of seconds. It's not as though a shot is fired followed by a pause, followed by another shot. With that in mind, the major issue here is the training. Cops should be trained to not only know how to fire their weapon, but also how to STOP firing.
Also, is it protocol to handcuff someone after they are lying on the ground dying?
To be fair CXB, I think the national solve rate for murders hovers around 40 to 45 percent. So, in effect, the NYPD is ahead of the game!
"'How the hell are the cops supposed to know it was a hairbrush?'
When it wasn't firing bullets maybe?"
Uh, police officers don't wait to be shot at before returning fire. You're thinking of rules of engagement for soldiers not at war, or something like that. Police officers don't need to wait to be shot at before shooting.
I mean, when the damn kids mother is screaming "HE'S GOT A GUN" I bet a hairbrush starts to look real deadly.
That said, probably one guy had an itchy trigger finger and shot, and then the rest started shooting in response.
If I was Al Sharpton I would protest against the doctor that he saw earlier in the day for his bipolar condition. His advice was, "Take twenty shots and call me in the morning."
Precious Blood was her stage name. Her real name is Shanquelle, just Shanquelle due to the lack of a parent who owned up to having her.
cxb:
Why?
would the cops shoot him if he was named
Khiel Stein?
how about Khiel Gothbaum?
Yes! Don't you remember the claw hammer guy? That's exactly what this case is.
Asshole posers deserve to be taken down. If the rapper society thinks they are wearing some "golden" shirt, fine. Shoot the mother fuckers. Then they will learn that they are fucked up and looking to be shot. No need to "snitch bitch", just be a ho for the homey and get your hair done in a nappy style.
Where is Al Sharpton?
Based on today's account in the times I think the mother should be charged with manslaughter. She precipitated the whole thing, and knew her son was planning to pretend he had a gun.
I first have to say, that with many of the other, sorry, all the other areas on gothamist.com relating to this story, there is way too much ostensible racism spouted out like some sort of silly joke. I am made to feel damn uncomfortable knowing that there are only 6 degrees of seperation between us all. That is hardly comforting considering the viscious nature of some of your reactions here. Half of you don't give a damn that those charged with protecting us are little better than street thugs. That there may be a huge racial compnent here. One ignoramous who was printed in the AMNY Letters section 11/15 even had the temerity to suggest that all black men carry guns and that is why he was shoot, because of a preconception by police that he must have been armed.
There is so much knee-jerk reaction to this most recent police shooting of yet another unarmed citizen. It is obvious that the protocols for handling this type of occurrence are inept and faulty on premise. It seems that the first priority is to kill rather than disarm or deescalate. That basic reality serves to further the notion that life other than self is valueless and self is, foremost, what matters even if your job is to serve and PROTECT. That includes protecting us from ourselves. Mental illness is a distinct characteristic of humans and the human condition. In a fit of rage, this young man goaded the police into doing exactly what it did, shoot to kill. What does that say about the police process and its leaders? It says loud and clear, we come first. Sure, the police commanded the kid to stop. But in his state of mind, a condition the NYPD should be expert at confronting, could not follow commands. Other less lethal measures should have been immediately at hand rather than the excuse that the special response units were getting set up when the events unfolded. Another process/protocol error. One might wish to consider, on another level, that this disturbed individual is a result of our very society. But that is another issue for discussion.
I believe the core mind-set of the NYPD needs to be one of avoiding weapons discharge till the very last possible moment to protect both the life of the officer AND the subject of concern. All this crap I have read about your not being a cop, you don't know what it is like to face this danger, is just that, crap. ALL of us become afraid for our lives at sometime during our existence. Fight or flight is high-school knowledge. Instincts for survival should be mediated if you are going to be in law enforcement. The cop mentality should be to understand this better than most people and act accordingly. Fear of death is and should not be the primary motivation for discharging a weapon. Of course, it is easy in hindsight to quarterback this recent scenario. But look at some of the details. Five cops discharged weapons from multiple points of convergence. All were shielded by automobiles. The subject was some 5-6 feet distant in evening but reasonable street lighting. Police accepted this setting as one of direct and imminent threat to themselves. Could all five have felt threatened so as to shot to kill when they were all at different position from the subject? It is unreasonable to believe that all five needed to discharge their weapons. Were they acting to preserve their own lives or the lives of their co-workers?
I am not anti-cop. I respect the position they place themselves in frequently. But it is still a career of choice and everyone of them knows full well the dangers of pursuing this line of work. And cops are not heros just because they became cops. If you go into police work believing this, you should never have been accepted in training. The police can consider themselves heros if they successfully avoided deadly force and resolved this peacefully. They did not. It seems the actions are a direct result of the police mind-set, a general societal acceptance of and condoning of violence and a lack of enlightened leadership in the NYPD which continues to perpetrate said concepts.
I further suggest that as a society steeped in violent imagery, an antiquated cowboy mentality and strike first preemptive thinking, our police forces merely reflect these societal attitudes. I guess a kindler, gentler America is a concept still too far removed from our nature.