Where Are the City's Files on the NYPD Shooting of Nicholas Heyward Jr?

Pictured: Nicholas Heyward, Jr. Photo courtesy of the Heyward family

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN, NY — For more than six months, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office has been re-examining the September 1994 police shooting of 13-year-old Nicholas Heyward, Jr.

However, the case’s original paperwork has yet to be located, according to those pushing for the investigation.

Heyward was shot and killed in a stairwell inside the Gowanus Houses in Boerum Hill by retired NYPD officer Brian George. The child was playing with a toy gun at the time of the shooting, and George was in the building to investigate reports of gunfire from area rooftops, according to The New York Times.

In December 1994, then-DA Charles J. Hynes chose not to bring the case before a grand jury, as the Times reported.

George remained an NYPD officer until he retired last year, an NYPD spokesperson told Patch. A civil suit was settled in 1998, as reported by the New York Post.

Now, Heyward’s father, Nicholas Heyward, Sr., is asking DA Ken Thompson to indict George for murder.

But at a Monday press conference held outside Thompson’s office, lawyer Roger Wareham, who is providing legal counsel to Heyward, said DA staffers told him in a closed-door meeting earlier Monday that they can’t locate the former DA’s files on the killing.

The NYPD has also failed to turn up documents from its original 1994 investigation, Wareham claimed.

Spokespeople for the NYPD and the DA’s Office responded Monday to questions related to the case, but ignored direct inquiries about the old documents.

Graham Weatherspoon, a retired NYPD detective and police-reform activist advising Heyward, said he was also in the Monday-morning meeting and heard the same claims from DA staffers.

Weatherspoon said he found it unusual that the files couldn’t be located.

“We have documents in this city going back to 1600,” he said. “How is it that you can’t find a file or record going back 20 years?”

“You had a police officer that killed somebody — not just somebody, a child,” the former cop continued. ”That kind of material just doesn’t evaporate into space, especially because you’re looking at potential litigation that the city is going to have.”

Even so, Heyward expressed optimism Monday that he’d get further with Thompson than he did with Hynes, the former DA.

“I am so honored we have a DA who is willing to take a real look at these cases,” Heyward said.

Heyward and Wareham both compared the case to the 2014 shooting death of Akai Gurley, who was killed in the stairwell of the Pink Houses in East New York by former NYPD officer Peter Liang. In February, Liang was found guilty of manslaughter.

That conviction marked the first time since 2003 that an NYPD officer had been found guilty of unlawfully killing a citizen, according to the New York Daily News.

An investigation completed by the paper in 2014 found that during the preceding 15 years, NYPD officers had killed 179 people while on duty. Just three had been indicted in state court. One was found guilty, but reportedly served no jail time.

Wareham said another meeting is scheduled with the DA’s Office in April.

Because so many years have passed since Heyward, Jr. was killed, New York State’s statute of limitations prevents George from being tried for manslaughter. He could, however, still be tried for murder, for which there is no statute of limitations.

Nabil Hassein, 27, an organizer with Millions March NYC, a group working alongside the Black Lives Matter movement, said he hoped renewed public interest in police brutality and accountability would work in the Heyward family’s favor.

Police violence “is a problem that is very old,” Hassein said outside the DA’s Office Monday. “I think the movement makes [the Heywards’ case] more likely to get addressed.”