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A grand jury declined to indict an off-duty police officer who fatally killed another driver in a road rage shooting last year.
Officer Sean Sawyer waited 19 hours before turning himself in for the October 2007 shooting of Jayson Tirado. An accident on the FDR forced cars to exit, and Tirado had apparently refused to let him merge in a lane off the FDR (closed due to an accident) and later cut him off on First Avenue. When Sawyer confronted Tirado around East 117th Street, Tirado supposedly gestured as if he had a gun and said, "You want to see my new Ruger?" which prompted Sawyer to fire. Tirado was not armed.
Since he wasn't indicted, Sawyer now only faces possible NYPD disciplinary charges; the Post reports he will probably be dismissed. Per a Daily News source, "You can't fire your gun and disappear for 19 hours. Even if he didn't hit anyone, he would be in trouble. In this case, he killed someone and ran."
Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau said his office would try to enact change, "I'm sure that most people would be shocked to learn that it is not a crime for a police officer to leave the scene of a shooting without reporting it as soon as practicable. I share their outrage. But that is the law. As a result of this case, we will be submitting legislation to change that.” (Currently, it's only against the law to leave the scene of a vehicular accident.) And Tirado's mother said, "They robbed me of my son and nobody is going to do anything. There was no gun. This was just a brutal murder."
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A cop getting let off by a judge for a horrible and cold-blooded murder.
Whew, good to see the cops gettin' a break for once.
Sorry, the jury let him off. Pfft
A man is dead because he wouldn't let a drunk cop cut him off!
Drunk, Testosterone-Fuelled, Fire-Arms Folly. If cops had to obey the laws they routinely enforce, they'd quit en-masse. At least 30% of cops are bullies who live for the privilege of joining the "blue-gang."
I cannot prove any of this, but since officer friendly went missing for 24hours there is no way to prove anything!
Where's Al Sharpton? No, I'm really serious, where is he, because this is outrageous. So now a cop can kill someone if that person mentions a gun without producing one?
The same thing happened within the ramparts division of the LAPD. There was even a PBS Frontiline show about it.
A guy pulled alongside a cop and said "I'm gunna bust a cap in your ass" and the other guy instantly emptied his clip into the other driver.
It turned out the other guy was also a cop and was not armed at the time.
Anywhere else, the cop would have been convicted. Unless you see a suspect brandishing an actual weapon, you have to hold your fire. This goes double for civilians. I'd like to know how that jury was instructed. if they felt like any hint of a weapon equals just cause, then hats off to the defense for fooling twelve gullible idiots. Hopefully the family of the victim will sue the piss out of Sean Sawyer and leave him in the gutter where he belongs.
Sorry, did I just wake up in Iran? WTF is going on? He had been in a *bar*, he deliberately *followed* the guy who cut him up and now ordinary people have decided that it's OK for the drunk stalker cop to shoot him, because the guy tried to scare the drunk stalker away by saying he has a gun.
Was the jury scared of being harassed/killed by the police? That's the only explanation I have.
This is fucking outrageous, painfully horrible injustice and the scariest part is that there is nothing anyone can do about it.
If you're not M.O.S. then DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! You will wind up in jail. But if you are on the force then please feel free to go ahead and murder someone while drunk and then run away for 19 hours. You'll only lose your $30K job and pension, so it might be worth it depending on how pissed you are at the guy.
Otherwise, please do not submit tapes showing you or your friends doing these types of activities. We won't view or even open any submissions, do don't bother.
Even using only police-on-civilian violence as a specific category in terms of involvement, I do think it's reasonable to ask about Sharpton's absence. The circumstances surrounding this case are to me more tragic than Sean Bell, yet it has received only a tenth of the publicity (especially as an "intersectional" issue among many organizations). I don't get it.
I could definitely understand some civil unrest over a drunk stalker cop pursuing his prey over a traffic pissing match, but I suppose we won't see Sharpton leading the way. Can someone tell me honestly why this case warrants so little activism?
Wow. I hope he's successful in his lawsuit against the city for damages incurred while inhaling Krispy Kremes at ground zero. Only the bad die young.
This also reminds me of that video where a guy was dared to flip off a cop, and when he did, the cop started beating him with his pr-24 baton.