On the night of November 20, 2014, a 28-year-old Black American man named Akai Kareem Gurley was fatally shot in the stairwell of the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York, Brooklyn. Gurley was with his girlfriend, and because the elevator in the building was out of service, they chose to take the stairs. The stairwell was pitch-dark due to a malfunctioning light, a condition that residents had reportedly complained about.
At the same time, two rookie New York City Police Department
officers, Peter Liang and Shaun Landau, were conducting a 'vertical patrol' of the building, a practice of checking stairwells from the roof down. As they entered the unlit eighth-floor stairwell, Officer Liang had his firearm drawn. When Gurley and his girlfriend entered the seventh-floor landing, fourteen steps below the officers, Liang fired his weapon. Neither side seemed to be aware of the other's presence, and no words were exchanged before the shot was fired. The single bullet ricocheted off a concrete wall and struck Gurley in the chest, causing a fatal injury. After being hit, Gurley stumbled down two flights of stairs before collapsing.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there was a period of confusion and inaction. The officers did not immediately render medical aid to Gurley. Instead, Liang and his partner argued about who should report the incident. It was Gurley's girlfriend who attempted CPR, taking instructions from a neighbor who was on the phone with a 911 operator. The police commissioner would later describe Gurley as a 'total innocent' and the shooting as an accident.
The officer who fired the shot, Peter Liang, became the focus of the investigation. On February 10, 2015, a grand jury indicted him on charges including second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and official misconduct. Prosecutors argued that Liang had acted recklessly by having his finger on the trigger of his weapon in an unlit stairwell and that the gun, which required 11.5 pounds of force to fire, could not have gone off unintentionally. Liang’s defense attorneys contended that the shooting was a tragic accident and that Liang was in a state of shock afterward.
Following a trial, a jury found Peter Liang guilty of manslaughter and official misconduct on February 11, 2016. He was immediately terminated from the NYPD. His partner, Shaun Landau, was also fired. However, at the sentencing on April 19, 2016, the judge reduced the manslaughter conviction to the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. Citing that the shooting was not intentional, the judge sentenced Liang to five years of probation and 800 hours of community service, sparing him any prison time. Gurley's family later reached a settlement of over $4 million in a wrongful death lawsuit against the city.
