Answers demanded over stag party shooting

An angry crowd gathered in New York last night, demanding to know why police officers killed an unarmed black man on the day of his wedding, firing dozens of shots that also wounded two of the man’s friends.

Some called for the removal of the city’s police commissioner.

At a vigil and rally yesterday, the day after 23-year-old Sean Bell was supposed to have married the mother of his two young children, a crowd led by civil rights leader the Rev Al Sharpton shouted “No justice, no peace.”

At one point, the crowd of a few hundred counted up to 50, the number of rounds that are estimated to have been fired.

“We cannot allow this to continue to happen,” Sharpton said at the gathering outside Mary Immaculate Hospital, where one of the wounded men was in critical condition. ”We’ve got to understand that all of us were in that car.”

Some in the crowd called for the sacking of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, yelling: “Kelly must go."

Saturday’s shootings happened around 4am outside the Kalua Cabaret, a strip club where Bell’s stag party was held.

The car, driven by Bell, was struck by 21 of the police bullets after the vehicle rammed an undercover officer and hit an unmarked NYPD minivan. Other shots hit nearby homes and shattered windows at a train station, though no one else was injured. The survivors were Joseph Guzman, 31, who was shot at least 11 times, and Trent Benefield, 23, who was hit three times. Guzman was in critical condition last night and Benefield was stable.

The police officers’ group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care said it was issuing a vote of no confidence in Kelly over the shooting.

Paul Browne, chief spokesman for the NYPD, yesterday said: ”We are continuing to look for additional witnesses to shed light on the incident, and assisting the district attorney’s office with its investigation.”

The five officers were placed on paid administrative leave pending the investigation, Browne said.

Community leaders planned a rally on December 6 at police headquarters.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his aides were in contact with Bell’s family and community leaders throughout the weekend. Bloomberg and Kelly also planned to meet today with community leaders at City Hall.

The NYPD has been criticised in other shootings of unarmed black men in recent years.

In 2003, Ousmane Zongo, 43, a native of Burkina Faso, was killed during a police raid on a warehouse where he repaired art and musical instruments. Zongo was shot four times, twice in the back, by an officer who was disguised as a postal worker. Zongo was unarmed.

In 1999, NYPD officers killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea who was shot 19 times in the entry to his apartment building. The four officers in that case were acquitted of criminal charges.

Relatives of all three men – many of them stoic, and some crying – attended yesterday’s vigil but none spoke publicly.

At a news conference on Saturday, Kelly said the department was still piecing together what happened, and that it was too early to say whether the shooting was justified.