“SHOCKED!” Family And Friends Pay Tribute To Brooklyn Father Killed By NYPD

DEBARYLIFE – Outside the Brooklyn deli where police had shot and killed 33-year-old Christian Emile the previous day, family, friends, pastors, and activists gathered on Monday night.

The pavement below was lined with prayer candles and old photos, and around a hundred individuals wrote messages on balloons that they released into the sky. Emile’s daughter held up five fingers as she scurried along East Flatbush’s streets. It had been the same night she had celebrated her fifth birthday when her father would pass away.

Emile’s great-grandmother Juliet Edwards remarked, “It was one of the last hours we spent with him.”

When Emile was pointing a gun at someone at the intersection of East 52nd Street and Church Avenue early on Sunday morning, two police officers and a sergeant with the department’s Community Response Team noticed him, according to an NYPD official.

Emile fled from police as they called at him to drop the pistol, according to NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, who made this announcement at a press conference later that day. Then, according to Maddrey, Emile was stunned for a short while by a Taser used by the police before he continued fleeing with the gun.

Emile was then shot six times by the officers in the head, body, and thigh, the municipal medical examiner reported.

As it does with every deadly police shot, the office of the state attorney general is looking into this one.

The NYPD added in a statement to Gothamist that shortly after, another man entered the nearby hospital claiming to be in the area of the gunshot and presenting with a graze wound to his leg.

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One of his employees, a woman, was slightly injured by a gunshot that evening, according to Tayar Alzuvidi, co-owner of the deli where Emile was wounded. When asked if there was a chance that two persons could have been struck by police gunfire that evening, the NYPD did not reply.

Gladimar Simeon heard gunfire coming from the street at 1:30 a.m. on Sunday while he was working on a podcast in his flat. Simeon captured the tense moment when Emile’s family and friends were facing a wall of roughly fifteen police officers who were pleading for information about what had transpired. In the background, one can hear a woman weeping.

Simeon claimed that although he’s become accustomed to neighborhood gunshots, he believed that someone he knows had been shot this time. The nonprofit magazine The Trace created a gun violence map last year that showed at least 28 shootings that happened within a mile of the deli. According to the map, there were at least ten deadly shootings.

Many of us are now numb to the violence, according to Simeon. “I don’t think a person who has been shot should feel normal.”

Church Avenue was littered with bullet casings early on Monday morning. The street was littered with copious amounts of police tape, and the block was lined with broken glass. Alzuvidi’s Deli was having its windows and glass doors repaired by construction workers.

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Two more bullet holes that pierced his family’s apartment door were examined. They reside above the shop. How many times the officers discharged their weapons was not disclosed by the NYPD.

James Ogle, the owner of the nearby karate studio, said that he had to spend $520 to fix a door that was shot through twice that evening.

He declared, “We’re all going to forget this by next week.” “Because there will be another development.”

He will not quickly forget, according to Andrew Graham, who described himself as Emile’s lifetime buddy. After Emile’s daughter’s birthday party on Saturday night, Graham stated he, Emile, and a few pals were going to a pub on the corner of East 52nd Street and Church Avenue. Graham claimed that after hearing of Emile’s passing, he returned home for a short while to change.

“I found it hard to accept,” he remarked. “I came right here.”

Delante, Emile’s brother, and a few of Emile’s children talked on Monday night while crying. His small daughter spoke into a microphone and said, “I love you, Daddy,” which caused mutters among the audience.

Carol Grey, dabbing away her emotions, leaned against a stationary vehicle and peered down at prayer candles that spelled out Emile’s nickname, ‘Flee’. Kimani Grey, her 16-year-old son, was shot and killed by police one block away eleven years ago.

She remarked, “We can’t keep doing this.”