A sea of angry demonstrators marched to the NYPD’s 75th precinct stationhouse Saturday night demanding the arrest of the rookie cop who shot to death an unarmed man in Brooklyn.
Roughly 200 protesters massed outside the stationhouse pelting officers with chants comparing the NYPD to the Ku Klux Klan.
“NYPD, KKK, how many kids you kill today?” the demonstrators chanted.
Rep. Charles Barron, hollering into a microphone, whipped the crowd into an emotional frenzy.
The march came hours after the sister of victim Akai Gurley, 28, said her slain brother didn’t deserve to die.
Akai Gurley
“All he is, is an innocent guy walking down the stairs who was killed for no apparent reason at all, going home to his baby mother and his kids,” Akisha Pringle, 18, said at the Harlem headquarters of the National Action Network.
Pringle described Gurley, who’s been arrested more than two dozen times, as “very giving, very kind.”
“Whatever he’s done in his past, that doesn’t justify what happened to him that night,” she said.
Probationary Officer Peter Liang was one of two cops conducting a vertical patrol inside a building at the Pink Houses in East New York, Brooklyn, at about 11:15 p.m.
A police source told the Daily News that Liang was holding his Glock 9-mm. pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Liang, who joined the force in July 2013, had just entered the pitch-black stairwell on the eighth floor when his gun accidentally discharged, police said.
Gurley was 14 steps away from Liang when a bullet — possibly a ricochet — tore through his chest. Gurley, who was with gal pal Melissa Butler, 27, ran from the seventh floor down to the fifth floor, where he collapsed.
“I’ll never be able to see him again, kiss or hug him again,” Gurley’s sister said. “That hurts me, and I know it hurts my mother.”
At one point, the Rev. Al Sharpton brought Gurley’s 2-year-old daughter to the microphone. Sharpton said little Akaila had something to say, but she didn’t part her lips.
“She told us she wanted to say she loved her daddy,” Sharpton said.
Gurley’s common-law wife, Kimberly Ballinger, sat silently while Sharpton said the family would be without a husband and father on Thanksgiving. The fired-up reverend called for a complete investigation.
Pringle, Akai's sister and daughter center, Rev. Sharpton right
A police source said no decision has been made yet whether to fire Liang, who remains on modified duty — stripped of his badge and gun. Probationary officers can be canned without a departmental hearing.
“The Police Department must deal with its training, must deal with its procedures,” he said. “The (Brooklyn) district attorney must deal with a thorough investigation.”
