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NEW YORK (AP) — A police sergeant has been indicted by a New York City grand jury on a murder charge in the shooting of a 66-year-old mentally ill woman, a death the mayor called tragic and unacceptable.
Sgt. Hugh Barry was arrested Wednesday in Deborah Danner’s October death, police said. He was awaiting an arraignment in Bronx court. A spokesman for his union called the charges ridiculous.
Police were responding to a 911 call about an emotionally disturbed person when Barry, who has been with the New York Police Department for eight years, encountered Danner in her Bronx apartment.
Authorities said at the time that Danner was threatening the sergeant with a bat when he shot her.
Officers had been called to Danner’s home several times before to take her to the hospital during psychiatric episodes and had been able to take her away safely, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the time.
On Oct. 18, Barry persuaded Danner to drop a pair of scissors she had been holding, police said. But when she picked up the bat and tried to strike him, he fired two shots that hit her torso, they said.
The police commissioner and mayor have condemned the shooting. They say he had a stun gun but didn’t use it.
Sgt. Ed Mullins, the head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said Barry “did not go to work intending to kill anyone.” He called the murder charge “obscene.”
Barry, an eight-year member of the department who had never fired his weapon before, was also charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, police said.
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