Wounded men dispute version of New York police

One of two men wounded in the hail of 50 police bullets that killed their unarmed black friend following a bachelor party has for the first time publicly disputed the police version of the incident.

In an interview Tuesday at a Queens hospital, Trent Benefield was asked if it was true that a fourth companion, possibly armed, fled the scene of the Nov. 25 shooting outside a Queens strip club.

“No,” he told NY1 News in a soft voice. “No fourth man.”

Benefield, 23, who was shot three times in the legs, was to be released from the hospital on Tuesday and meet with the black civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton, according to Sharpton’s office.

“My friend’s dead,” Benefield said in the interview. “I’m shot up. We need justice.”

The shooting killed 23-year-old Sean Bell on his wedding day and wounded two of his companions, setting off a storm of outrage in New York, especially in the black community. The three victims are black, and the police officers included two blacks, two whites and one Hispanic.

Lawyers for Benefield and the still-hospitalized Joseph Guzman, 31, say both men also have claimed that none of the five undercover and plainclothes officers identified themselves as police before opening fire. The barrage of bullets killed Bell on the morning of his wedding.

The officers “never” identified themselves, Guzman said, speaking from his bed at Mary Immaculate Hospital in a separate interview published Tuesday by the New York Daily News.

About Bell, Guzman said, “I took 16 shots, but a superstar died that night. I loved him.”

Guzman also called on New Yorkers outraged by the shooting to exercise restraint.

“No violence, man,” he said. “No violence. Not in my name.”

Police have said an undercover officer — part of a team investigating the club for prostitution and drugs — began following Bell and his friends to their car after overhearing Guzman threaten to retrieve a gun in a dispute with another man. As the car started to pull away, it bumped the officer and then smashed into an unmarked police van, police said.

Through his lawyer, the undercover officer has insisted he believed Guzman was pulling a gun when he opened fire on the car. No gun was found. He and other witnesses also have said there was a fourth man in or near the car who escaped on foot.

The five officers have been put on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of a grand jury investigation by the Queens district attorney’s office.

This week’s interview with Benefield comes on the heels of National Urban League President Marc H. Morial and New York Urban League President Darwin M. Davis calling for an immediate intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to investigate reports of witness intimidation and harassment surrounding the case.

According to The New York Times, police raided an apartment complex in their search to find the elusive fourth man. In the process, they arrested four people, three men and one woman, and brought them in for questioning. According to media reports, one of the men they brought in — Erskine Williams Jr. — is a friend of the victims and son of Bishop Erskine Williams Sr., raising the specter of witness intimidation.

Officers have raided at least one home, picked up witnesses for such offenses as unpaid tickets and scoured vacant lots in an effort to find a potential witness and perhaps a missing gun.

Critics warned that the search has created a climate of fear in a community already outraged by the shooting.

They said police have concocted a “phantom gunman” in a desperate effort to show that officers were justified in opening fire.

“This kind of police conduct is frightening, and it serves as a chilling impact on those witnesses who want to come forward and simply tell what they saw, what they heard, so that justice can be served,” said Charlie King, an attorney who said he represents several potential witnesses.

In a statement, police officials insisted last week that their investigation was “appropriate.” And Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking on his weekly radio show, called some of the criticism unfair.

Union officials met behind closed doors with prosecutors on Monday and urged them to be impartial in their investigation of the killing of Bell on Nov. 25 outside a seedy Queens strip club. That night the club was both the venue for Bell’s bachelor party and a target of an undercover vice operation.

“Fiction on the street shouldn’t become fact in the courtroom,” Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, said following the meeting.

District Attorney Richard Brown had a similar sit-down last week with Nicole Paultre, Bell’s fiancée and other grieving relatives.

The union officials said prosecutors offered no timetable for when a grand jury might begin hearing evidence, including the testimony of the five officers. The officers have been put on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the probe, and their guns have been taken away.

Visiting a Florida elementary school with Gov. Jeb Bush on Monday, Bloomberg said he was offended by some of the protests since the shooting, including one sign that read, “Death to Pigs.”

“It’s disgusting and disgraceful and they should have learned from the past that those kinds of thoughts and signs have no place in our society, no matter what happened Saturday morning a week ago,” Bloomberg said.

Speaking on CNN Monday, a subdued Paultre told interviewer Larry King that she was focused on staying strong for their two young children.

“I’m really not angry,” she said in her first extensive comments since Bell’s death. “I’m more just trying to be strong. We just want justice. I want justice. Me and my family, we want justice. That’s it, and that’s what we’re praying for and hoping for.”

On Saturday, hundreds of tearful mourners paid their respects to Bell in the same church where he was to have married his high school sweetheart just one week earlier.

“They took his life, but we can’t let them take his legacy,” Sharpton said to cheers and “Amens” from the overflow crowd at the Community Church of Christ. “We must give Sean a legacy. A legacy of justice, a legacy of fairness. We don’t hate cops. We don’t hate race. We hate wrong.”

This story was compiled from Associated Press wire reports.