Cuevas' Family Wants Grand Jury Review - says NYPD Police Shooting of Latino Man was No Accident

Video Unclear whether gun went off during or after collision. Witness said Police Shot him after [MORE] 

From [HERE] The family of the bodega worker killed by a police bullet met with the Bronx district attorney on Sunday to request that a grand jury investigate the actions of the police officer who fired the fatal shot on Friday, representatives for the family said. The district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, made “no commitments” beyond a pledge to conduct an independent investigation into the shooting by the police of Reynaldo Cuevas, a 20-year-old bodega worker, according to a family spokesman, Fernando Mateo, who accompanied the family into the meeting.

The police, citing surveillance footage of the episode, have said the shooting outside Aneury’s Deli was accidental. Police officials have said that the officer’s gun discharged when the officer became entangled with Mr. Cuevas. The two collided, the police said, directly outside the bodega as Mr. Cuevas fled from robbers still inside.

But at a news conference Sunday outside the district attorney’s office, Mr. Mateo said that Mr. Cuevas’s relatives believed that the single fatal shot was fired after the collision, while the police officer was kneeling over Mr. Cuevas. “We believe that he was murdered,” Mr. Mateo, a spokesman for the Bodega Association of the United States, told reporters.

After relatives of Mr. Cuevas had watched video of the episode, Mr. Mateo said, they concluded that Mr. Cuevas, who weighed about 125 pounds, “brushed the officer, fell to the ground, and we believe he was shot when he was on the ground.”

The victim's cousin Jose Garcia said he witnessed the scene. "I saw the police shoot him," Garcia told NBC 4 New York. "He came up, but he didn't put his hands up. And he tripped or something and when he fell on the floor, they shot him." [MORE]

At the news conference, a lawyer representing the family, Sanford A. Rubenstein, also expressed skepticism of the police account.

“How do you accidentally pull a trigger?” he asked.

A spokesman for the Bronx district attorney’s office, Steven Reed, said Mr. Johnson told the family that “there is going to be a thorough investigation and that we’re taking this matter extremely seriously.”

The district attorney’s office, as standard procedure, conducts its own investigations in police-involved shootings.

Mr. Cuevas’s mother, Ana Cuevas, fainted during the news conference before she was scheduled to speak. She went limp and fell to the pavement as she listened to Mr. Mateo speak to reporters about her son’s death and the chaotic scene that followed outside the bodega, on Franklin Avenue at East 169th Street.

But during the earlier meeting with Mr. Johnson, Ms. Cuevas told the prosecutor that she believed the police officer who shot her son deserved to go to jail along with the three men who were robbing the store at the time of the shooting, Mr. Mateo said in an interview after the news conference.

Mr. Mateo said that during the earlier meeting, Mr. Johnson told members of the family that “he understands the grief and the pain that the family is going through right now.” “He said he wasn’t going to rush into any judgment or conclusion,” Mr. Mateo said.

“He’s not committed to a grand jury, but he’s committed to an independent investigation,” Mr. Rubenstein said.

The Police Department has not identified the officer who fired the shot, but police officials have said he was a housing officer who had been on the force for seven years.

At the news conference, Mr. Cuevas’s uncle, Alcibiades Cuevas, the bodega owner, described his nephew as a “a very humble kid, a very hard-working kid.”