Delrawn Small: The Police Shooting Victim You Didn't Hear About Last Week

Pictured: Delrawn Small and his infant son. Photo courtesy of the victim's family

EAST NEW YORK, BROOKLYN — The names of two American black men killed by police officers early last week, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castille in St. Paul, went viral across the country just hours after they drew their last breaths. They were hashtagged and shared at exponential speed on Facebook and Twitter; scrawled across thousands of protest signs; spoken at bars and desks and dinner tables. They inspired the largest revival of the Black Lives Matter movement since 2014. (And, tragically, planted such rage in one crazed gunman that he had murdered five police officers in Dallas by midweek.)

But the name of a third victim, an unarmed black man killed by an off-duty Brooklyn cop while driving his family to a Fourth of July fireworks show that same week, wasn't making the rounds.

That's probably because his death wasn't caught on cellphone video.

Here's what the public knew right away: Delrawn Small, a 37-year-old father of three from East New York, was killed in front of his family at a traffic light by NYPD Officer Wayne Isaacs, who is also 37 and also black. Isaacs works in Bed-Stuy but was not on duty that night.

In the absence of instant visual evidence, NYPD officials immediately twisted their narrative of the shooting in Isaacs' favor.

New York City's major news outlets then rampantly quoted unnamed "police sources" as saying surveillance footage recorded by nearby businesses, and reviewed by the NYPD, would prove that Small had attacked Isaacs — giving the cop no choice but to shoot. Other sources told DNAinfo that Isaacs had thought he was being carjacked.

Surveillance video leaked Friday, July 8, by the New York Post changed everything.

The video, included below, shows Small barely had enough time to approach Isaacs' window before the officer shot him in the head.

Small can be seen lurching back from the window, taking a few shaky steps down Atlantic and collapsing between parked cars.

The video is black and white, grainy and hard to make out — but it's enough to induce the same kind of nausea we felt as we watched Sterling and Castille die on tape. And, hopefully, enough for Small to be remembered in popular history as the third black man killed by a police officer during the week of July 4, 2016.

"My uncle was killed in cold blood by somebody wearing a badge, and that man is still walking free today," Small's nephew, 22-year-old Zayanahla Vines, said at a Brooklyn protest he organized Saturday, one day after the video dropped.

"I'm tired of this — fighting for rights that should be given to us as American people," he said.

Vines described his uncle as a "great guy" and a family man who had turned his life around after spending time in jail in his 20s.

It took until Monday, July 11, for NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton to announce Isaacs had been stripped of his gun and badge — in other words, switched to a desk job but kept on payroll.

“We are not against black cops or white cops — we are against wrong cops,” Brooklyn-born civil-rights leader Al Sharpton said of Isaacs over the weekend. “This cop told a story that is wrong, and someone lost their life. If he told a story that doesn’t stand up about his alibi, why should we believe anything else he says? He killed a man.”

Isaacs and another NYPD officer were reportedly accused in a 2014 lawsuit of beating a black man and calling him the N word. The city settled with the victim for $20,000, according to the Post.

Small's killing is currently being investigated by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

Asked by a reporter Saturday what justice for his uncle would look like, Vines replied: "Throw [Isaacs] in jail, just like you would throw me in jail if I did that."

Originally published July 11. With additional reporting by John V. Santore