Pubdate: Sun, 19 Mar 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
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Author: David Barstow

IN FATAL SHOOTING, SIDES CLASH IN PORTRAYING VICTIM AND OFFICER

About two dozen witnesses have been interviewed.
Physical evidence -- a gun, a bullet, bloody clothing -- has been
bagged and tagged. As always, police officials have promised a full
and fair investigation.

But as New York City grapples with yet another fatal police shooting
of an unarmed man, questions of blame are rapidly being overshadowed
by a bitter, politically charged battle over the temperament and
character of the two men at the center of this shooting -- Patrick M.
Dorismond, the 26-year-old security guard who was killed outside a
Midtown bar early Thursday morning, and Anthony Vasquez, the
29-year-old undercover detective whose service weapon fired the fatal
shot during an attempted drug sting.

It is a battle around the murky details of long-ago events: among
other things, Detective Vasquez in 1997 pulled a gun in a bar fight,
and before that he shot a neighbor's stray Rottweiler. Mr. Dorismond
was accused in 1993 of punching a man in an argument over drugs, and
in 1996 he was arrested and accused of pulling a gun during a dispute
with a motorist and screaming, "Don't sign your death warrant!"

The issue of temperament was raised within hours of the shooting, when
Police Commissioner Howard Safir volunteered partial details of Mr.
Dorismond's arrest record during a news conference. He made no mention
of Detective Vasquez's departmental disciplinary history, and on
Friday Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani commended Detective Vasquez as a
distinguished officer who "put his life on the line in the middle of
the night to protect the safety and security of this city."

Yesterday, at two protest rallies, the Rev. Al Sharpton, United States
Representative Charles B. Rangel and a host of elected officials
condemned Mr. Safir and Mr. Giuliani, accusing them of trying to
deflect criticism of the department by distorting the severity of Mr.
Dorismond's arrest record while overlooking his devotion to family and
work.

"It's like calling a rape victim a whore," Mr. Rangel
said.

The mayor, Mr. Sharpton charged, has the same reflex reaction to each
police shooting: "He automatically says, "Give me the rap sheet of the
victim.' "

Yet even as they criticized Mr. Giuliani's one-dimensional portrait of
Mr. Dorismond, Mr. Sharpton and other black leaders harshly denounced
Detective Vasquez in much the same way. They portrayed him as a
hot-headed officer who was quick to assume the worst about a black
man, and they left little room for the possibility that, as the
officer's lawyer has asserted, the gun discharged by accident during a
brief, chaotic struggle outside the Wakamba Cocktail Lounge.

"Anybody that would shoot a dog has no business on the police force in
the first place," Mr. Sharpton said during a rally at his National
Action Network headquarters in Harlem, not mentioning that Detective
Vasquez has said he shot the dog to protect his 5-year-old son. At a
City Hall rally later in the day, Helen M. Marshall, a city
councilwoman from Queens, said, "This officer has a history of being
quick on the trigger."

In response, Mr. Giuliani yesterday staunchly defended Mr. Safir's
description of Mr. Dorismond's arrest record -- a description that
failed to note that Mr. Dorismond had never actually been convicted of
a crime, that all charges against him had either been dropped, reduced
to disorderly conduct violations or, in the case of an incident that
occurred when Mr. Dorismond was 13, sealed by court order.

"When a person has shown a propensity to violence, a propensity to
hitting other people, a propensity to robbery, and to attempted
robbery, and a propensity to being involved in drug transactions, that
doesn't necessarily answer the whole thing, but these are relevant
facts that the people have the right to know," the mayor said after
marching in a St. Patrick's Day parade in Syracuse.

He added: "People have the right to know the background and record of
a person involved in a criminal situation. It is relevant on either
side. The fact is that a police officer's record is relevant, and so
is the record of a person involved in a criminal incident."

Mr. Giuliani has repeatedly appealed to residents to resist forming
conclusions until more facts are known. But Mr. Rangel said yesterday
that it was Mr. Giuliani who had rushed to judgment. "The mayor," Mr.
Rangel said, "is committed to polarizing this city -- white against
black -- for personal or political reasons, or both."

The shooting occurred about 90 minutes after Mr. Dorismond finished
his 3-to-11 p.m. shift Wednesday as a security guard for the 34th
Street Partnership, a consortium of Midtown businesses. Mr. Dorismond
and another security guard, Kevin Kaiser, stopped at the Wakamba
lounge for a few beers.

After midnight, as Mr. Dorismond and Mr. Kaiser waited for a cab, they
were approached by an undercover officer who was trying to entice
street-level dealers to sell him drugs. "You got smoke?" Officer
Anderson Moran asked Mr. Dorismond.

Much of what happened next is disputed. An argument ensued, and
quickly escalated. Mr. Kaiser has said that Officer Moran threw the
first punch; police officials have said Mr. Dorismond attacked first.
Detective Vasquez, who was one of Officer Moran's backup officers, has
said through his lawyer that his gun fired by accident when Mr.
Dorismond lunged at him. As is standard practice, the Police
Department has taken Detective Vasquez's gun and placed him on desk
duty pending the outcome of its investigation.

Mr. Sharpton yesterday repeatedly compared Mr. Dorismond's death to
that of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed West African immigrant who was shot
19 times by a team of plainclothes officers last year. Indeed, Mr.
Diallo's father, Saikou Diallo, took the stage at Mr. Sharpton's
headquarters to give condolences to Mr. Dorismond's family, including
his mother, Marie Dorismond, who wore one of her son's shirts and
repeatedly broke down in tears.

"Help me stand up for my justice," Mrs. Dorismond told the
audience.

Mr. Dorismond's death, on the heels of last month's acquittal of the
four officers who shot Mr. Diallo, has touched a raw nerve in a city
that celebrates its drop in crime but frets that it has come at the
cost of heavy-handed police tactics.

On the steps of City Hall yesterday morning, about 30 members of the
New York State Council of Black Elected Democrats protested the
shooting, and some speakers called on Mr. Safir to resign for trying
to "denigrate the reputation" of Mr. Dorismond.

In a later news conference, Norman Siegel, executive director of the
New York Civil Liberties Union, asked New York residents to wear black
ribbons to protest police brutality.

Late yesterday afternoon, a few hundred people -- including several of
Mr. Dorismond's fellow security guards -- marched from the cocktail
lounge to Times Square then to Herald Square. They chanted "N.Y.P.D.
murderers!" In Herald Square, a handful of the marchers engaged in a
shoving match with police officers, and at least four people were arrested.

Lost amid the shouting and anger is an emerging portrait of two
ambitious and at times rash young men who shared the same Roman
Catholic faith, the same humble origins, the same modest
aspirations.

Mr. Dorismond was born in 1974, seven years after his mother came to
this country from Haiti. A nurse at Kings County Hospital, Marie
Dorismond named her son after a priest she admired. She sent him to
Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn, the mayor's alma mater.

One childhood friend, Tezana White, 24, recalled Mr. Dorismond as the
sort of boy who walked away from fights. "The person the police are
describing and the person I know are not the same," she said.

But Mr. Safir described Mr. Dorismond as someone who had been in
trouble for serious incidents. He said Mr. Dorismond was arrested in
1987 for robbery and assault, again in 1993 for attempted robbery and
assault and yet again in 1996 for criminal possession of a weapon. But
Mr. Safir's description was incomplete.

Court officials said that the case in 1987, when Mr. Dorismond was 13,
was dropped and never went before a judge. Yesterday, Mr. Sharpton
said the case involved a childish dispute over a quarter.

According to Brooklyn prosecutors, Mr. Dorismond was arrested on Aug.
11, 1993, for punching a friend who brought him $5 worth of marijuana
when he had paid $15. Mr. Dorismond pleaded guilty the next day to
disorderly conduct and was ordered to perform a few days of community
service.

Nearly three years later Mr. Dorismond was arrested again after an
altercation with a driver in Brooklyn. The other driver told the
police that Mr. Dorismond had threatened him with a gun. But no gun
was recovered, and Mr. Dorismond performed another short stint of
community service for disorderly conduct.

For a time, Mr. Dorismond worked as a D.J. in Haitian nightclubs. He
called himself Avalanche. In recent years, as he confronted the
responsibilities of supporting two daughters, he began to settle down
and mature, friends and family members said.

Mr. Dorismond said he took the security job as a step toward becoming
a police officer. Colleagues said Mr. Dorismond was good at his job,
adept at spotting vandals and moving street peddlers on their way.

Mr. Dorismond lived in a basement apartment in East Flatbush with his
girlfriend, Karen Sturkey, and their 1-year-old daughter, Destiny.
Neighbors described him as quiet and courteous, but they also said
police officers had been called to the apartment to settle quarrels.
One neighbor, Jonathan Inniss, 21, said the couple broke up a few weeks ago.

But Ms. Sturkey, 22, said that Mr. Dorismond, while at times frazzled
by the stresses of work and money, did all he could to support his
children. "He was a good father," she said, a sentiment shared by
Dwanna Sobers, 26, the mother of his older daughter, 5-year-old Infiniti.

Detective Vasquez, a divorced father of a 5-year-old son, shares a
modest home with his parents in Shirley, on Long Island, where he
graduated from Longwood Senior High School. His former wife, Jennifer,
worked as a manicurist in a nearby nail salon, and he held a series of
jobs in the area before joining the Police Department five years ago.

Joe Medina, owner of Shirley Sleep Shoppe, where Detective Vasquez
once worked as a deliveryman, said he was a dependable employee.

Neighbors said Detective Vasquez seemed to carry himself with new
pride after he joined the Police Department. He often wore his badge
on a chain around his neck, and he liked to talk about his work as an
undercover detective. He grew his hair long, and acquired a few
tattoos. "I've got to fit in out there," he told one friend, Rich Clark.

In 1996, a year after joining the Police Department, he shot his
neighbor's dog, a 115-pound Rottweiler named Max, which had gotten
loose. He told the dog's owner that he shot the dog because he was
worried about what it might do to his young son. Max survived.

In February 1997, Detective Vasquez was arrested in State College,
Pa., after drawing his service weapon during a bar fight. The Daily
News, quoting a bouncer at the Lion's Den bar, reported yesterday that
Detective Vasquez started the fight, then pulled out his weapon to
stop it.

After nine months under investigation, Detective Vasquez received a
mild punishment, the loss of one vacation day. Later that year, his
wife accused him of domestic abuse, but then dropped the complaint.