After Man’s Death, Scrutiny for a Police Chase - Witnesses say NYPD ran Black Man Over

From [NY Times] Tamon Robinson’s sideline of digging up cobblestones and selling them to scrap dealers had gotten him arrested numerous times.

And when the police two weeks ago spotted him in the dark early morning hours unearthing decorative paving stones at a Brooklyn housing project, Mr. Robinson sprinted for the building where his mother lived.

The distance was just 100 yards. Two officers on foot were far behind. A police car, carrying a second set of officers, raced to catch up, and they ordered him through a loudspeaker to stop running.

As Mr. Robinson turned up a fenced-in walkway to the front door, the car sped alongside and then veered into his path, said a person familiar with the officers’ account who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The officers in the car were trying to block his escape into the building, the local precinct commander said. But the result was a collision violent enough to leave a noticeable dent on the car just above one of the front tires.

Mr. Robinson, an unarmed 27-year-old, fell to the ground. Last Wednesday, never regaining consciousness, he died of his head injuries.

The episode at the Bay View Houses, a project in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, has raised questions about the decision of the police to use a car to outrun a man fleeing on foot on a pedestrian walkway — approximately 12 feet wide by 40 feet long — that left virtually no room for error.

The New York Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, which investigates complaints of excessive force, has opened an inquiry, although Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said that “preliminarily it looks to be an accident.”

As new details about the chase emerged, Mr. Robinson’s relatives, who said at a news conference this week that they were considering a wrongful-death lawsuit, questioned why such an aggressive maneuver had been taken in pursuit of someone suspected of such a minor crime.

“Even if he was stealing paving stones, the penalty for stealing paving stones is not death,” said Sanford A. Rubenstein, a prominent lawyer who handles police brutality cases and is representing the family along with Jay H. Schwitzman.

There are differing accounts as to how the collision between Mr. Robinson and the police car occurred.

Two women who said they saw the accident recounted that the car was moving when it turned directly into Mr. Robinson and hit him.

Deputy Inspector George Fitzgibbon, the commander of the 69th Precinct, which covers Canarsie, said the officers had brought the car to a stop to block Mr. Robinson’s path to the door.

“Whether he tried to hurdle it, or just slammed into the car, and fell back, that’s what he did,” Inspector Fitzgibbon said at a community meeting on Tuesday night.

One of the women who challenged that account, Zina Callahan, 38, said she watched the chase from her second-floor apartment above the walkway to the building after hearing the screech of a car and a police loudspeaker blaring: “Stop running! Stop running!”

“He made a turn to come into the walkway, and the cop sped up and he hit him,” Ms. Callahan said. “He went up a little in the air. He came down. He rolled over twice.”

Franchette Mowbray, 26, said she watched the episode from her eighth-floor apartment. “They hit him,” she said. “He flew up and he came down. They backed the car up, and they told him to get up. People were yelling out their windows screaming at the cops, ‘We saw what you did.’ ”

The department’s Patrol Guide instructs officers to drive in a “manner to avoid injury to person.” Mr. Browne said he did not know whether there was departmental policy instructing officers on the use of police cars to chase suspects who were on foot.

Geoffrey Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina who is an expert on police pursuits, said there was nothing improper about using a police car to chase down someone on foot as long as the vehicle was not used recklessly or as a weapon. “If the officer drove up to cut him off, and the guy ran into him, well, sorry,” he said. “But if the officer ran into the suspect, that’s force way disproportionate to the offense.”

Mr. Robinson, a trim man standing 6 feet tall who liked Jay-Z’s music and Martin Lawrence movies, worked full time as a cashier on the 6 a.m. shift at a Connecticut Muffin store in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

But during his time off he often scrounged around construction sites, stealing items like scrap metal and cobblestones, selling them to scrap dealers in New Jersey and in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In 2009, he was arrested four times for stealing various types of cobblestones, including one arrest at the World Trade Center site at 4 a.m., which netted him a 15-day jail sentence, according to the authorities.

On April 12, the police were called to the Bay View houses by someone on 911 who reported a man removing paving stones. The police said they later found Mr. Robinson’s black Chevrolet Suburban loaded with about 120 of the heavy blocks, worth more than $2,000.

A number of residents at the housing complex who say they saw the episode described being upset at how the officers treated Mr. Robinson, saying he was handled roughly even though he was injured and unconscious. The officers initially shouted at him to wake up before lifting him to the hood of the police car and placing him in handcuffs, which is standard police procedure, according to several accounts.

An ambulance then arrived to the scene and took Mr. Robinson to Brookdale University Hospital, where later that day doctors declared him brain-dead, his mother, Laverne Dobbinson, said.

The police charged him with several crimes, including grand larceny and obstructing governmental administration. He was cuffed to his hospital bed and had a police guard posted at his door.

In the following days, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, informed that Mr. Robinson would probably die, declined to go forward with the case, said Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the office.

Mr. Robinson was taken off a respirator last Wednesday. An autopsy determined that the death was a result of blunt impact injuries to the head.

A small memorial shrine of candles, balloons and signed condolences from friends now rests at the end of the walkway where he was struck.