The detective who fired the first shot in the barrage that killed Sean Bell testified Wednesday he used his gun because he thought a pal of the groom-to-be was going to strike first. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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“All I saw was his arm coming up,” Det. Gescard Isnora said of Joseph Guzman, a passenger in Bell’s car during the fateful moments immediately before the highly controversial 2006 police shooting.
Isnora, who was undercover at the time of the shooting, testified in his NYPD trial that he believed Guzman held a firearm in his hand – and that this fear trumped the detective’s reluctance to use his gun.
“I wasn’t going to wait for him to pull up and ‘Boom!’ I wasn’t going to wait for that,” Isnora said, providing his first public statements since the shooting, which claimed Bell’s life on the morning he was to be married.
“But me firing my weapon – that was the last thing I wanted to do.”
Isnora’s round touched off a hail of 50 police bullets on a side-street near a notorious Jamaica strip club, where Bell and his friends had been partying.
The detective’s testimony struck Bell’s fiancé as a desperate attempt to save his job.
“I think it’s clear from the evidence that Det. Isnora doesn’t belong on the force,” Nicole Paultre Bell said outside NYPD headquarters.
Bell left Club Kalua and got into his car along with Guzman and another pal, Trent Benefield. Isnora approached their car because, he testified, he had heard Guzman minutes earlier threaten to get his gun to settle an argument he had with another man outside the club. Isnora testified that he feared the trio was about to pull off a drive by shooting outside the club.
