NYPD Officer Peter Liang 'Guilty' of Manslaughter in Akai Gurley Shooting

Akai Gurley’s aunt speaking in front of Brooklyn criminal court in 2015. Photo via NYersAgainstBratton/Twitter

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN, NY — A jury for the Brooklyn Supreme Court has found rookie NYPD Officer Peter Liang guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of unarmed affordable-housing resident Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father to two young girls, in 2014, according to multiple reporters at the courthouse Thursday night.

Immediately after the verdict came down, the NYPD announced that Liang had been fired from the force.

Liang shot Gurley while conducting a ”vertical patrol” of a darkened stairwell in the Louis Pink Houses in City Line (near East New York) on Nov. 20, 2014.

Gurley was reportedly in the stairwell with his friend, Pink Houses resident Melissa Butler, who he was visiting at the time. The officer’s bullet is said to have hit Gurley after ricocheting off the side of the stairwell.

A medical examiner’s report showed the bullet “[tore] through his body, fractured his third rib, nicked his sternum, and pierced both his heart and diaphragm,” according to Buzzfeed News.

Prosecutors with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office did not claim that Liang intentionally shot Gurley. Instead, they argued that the officer shouldn’t have had his finger on the trigger of his gun as he patrolled the Louis Pink Houses — and that he should have tried to help resuscitate Gurley, or at least call him an ambulance, as soon as he saw the young man was shot.

A judge will reportedly hand down Gurley’s sentence on April 14. He faces up to 15 years in jail.

The Brooklyn jury also found Liang guilty Thursday of ”official misconduct” for not helping Gurley as he died, according to reports.

Liang had plead “not guilty” to the charges. His attorneys argued that the shooting was accidental, and that he felt ill-equipped to assist Gurley as he lay dying.

New York Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir, who’s been closely following Liang’s two-week trial, wrote of the Nov. 20 shooting:

At one point, Officer Liang opened a door into an unlighted stairwell and his gun went off. The bullet glanced off a wall and hit Akai Gurley, 28, who was walking down the stairs with his girlfriend, piercing his heart. ... Mr. Gurley’s girlfriend, Melissa Butler, had testified in the trial that while she knelt in a pool of his blood trying to resuscitate him, the officer stopped briefly, but did not help before proceeding down the stairs.

When Thursday’s verdict came down, the Times reporter said she watched Gurley’s family members “huddled in a group embrace, crying, swaying and offering words of relief and thanks.”

His aunt, Hortencia Peterson, told the New York Daily News: “We’re not rejoicing. But it’s about being accountable. It’s about a girl who will never know her father.”

Liang killed Gurley just a few months after another NYPD officer, Daniel Pantaleo, was caught on video choking Staten Island resident Eric Garner to death. ”I can’t breathe,” Garner repeated before he died — a phrase that became central to the Black Lives Matter protest movement across the country.

A Staten Island grand jury later decided not to indict Pantaleo.

In fact, according to the Daily News, Liang’s conviction marks the first time since 2003 that a court has found an NYPD officer to be at fault for a citizen’s death. And in that case, Officer Bryan Conroy was found guilty of “criminally negligent homicide” — one step down from manslaughter — for killing African immigrant Ousmane Zongo in a raid on a Manhattan warehouse. Conroy served no time in jail.