Saheed Vassell's Family Calls For More Transparency About Killing

NEW YORK CITY HALL — Saheed Vassell's family wants the NYPD to tell them — and the public — who killed their son. The Crown Heights man's parents and siblings, along with police-reform activists, called on the Police Department to release more information about his April 4 death, including the names of the four cops who shot him.

"All we are asking for is full transparency on everything that took place that day," Andwele Vassell, Saheed's brother, said Thursday at a rally outside City Hall.

The NYPD on Tuesday released the first video showing police shooting and killing the unarmed Vassell, who was carrying a metal pipe that 911 callers said looked like a gun.

The video, pulled from a surveillance camera near the intersection of Montgomery Street and Utica Avenue, shows the killing from a distance. An unmarked car pulls into the intersection just after 4:18 p.m. on April 4, followed by two marked patrol cars.

People on the street start to scatter about 15 seconds later, apparently as four officers fired 10 shots at Vassell.

The four-minute, 49-second tape is "the only footage in NYPD possession at this time that captures the shooting on video," Phillip Walzak, the deputy commissioner for public information, said in a statement first issued Tuesday.

"The incident remains under investigation, and any and all materials discovered in the course of this investigation are being delivered to the Attorney General," Walzak said, referring to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is probing the shooting.

But Vassell's family want more. They said they want the NYPD to release the names of the officers involved and their disciplinary records. They also want every piece of unedited footage from the incident, including any that shows how the cops responded and what they did before and after the shooting.

The Police Department last week released a series of videos showing Vassel brandishing the metal pipe like a gun at people on the street. That's part of the NYPD's "non-stop PR campaign to justify the officers' actions" and put Vassell under a microscope instead, said Anthonine Pierre, the deputy director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, an activist group.

"He was portrayed as someone he is not," Telah Vassell, Saheed's sister, said of her brother.

Asked for comment on the advocates' calls, the NYPD only gave Walzak's statement from Tuesday that accompanied the surveillance video. The department's public information office did not answer questions about whether the NYPD would release the officers' identities or disciplinary records.

Mayor Bill de Blasio defended the Police Department, saying it has handled the case in a way that respects "the safety of everyone involved."

"There will be a full NYPD investigation and clearly a full and independent investigation by the attorney general," the Democratic mayor said at an unreleated news conference Thursday. "That’s the right venue to determine the whatever actions are needed next, and that’s obviously a venue in which, in the attorney general’s case, the names of the officers will come forward if there was further action taken."

The shooting sparked protests in Crown Heights last week. Family members said Vassell was well known and loved in the community.

"He did not deserve to die like that," his mother, Lorna Vassell, said Thursday.

Vassell is set to be honored with a funeral service next Friday, Pierre said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when the NYPD released the video showing officers shooting Saheed Vassell. It was Tuesday.

(Lead image: Telah Vassell, Saheed Vassell's sister, speaks at a news conference outside City Hall on Thursday. Photo by Noah Manskar/Patch)