Trial opens for NYPD officer charged in death of Akai Gurley
After a week of jury selection, opening arguments began Monday in King’s County Supreme Court as the case against rookie NYPD Officer Peter Liang went underway. Liang, 29, had been with the department for 18 months on Nov. 20, 2014, when he, along with his partner Shaun Landau, conducted a vertical patrol of the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York. While entering a darkened seventh-floor landing, Liang’s service weapon fired once, striking Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old unarmed black man, who had just entered the stairwell after visiting his girlfriend.
Despite widespread agreement that the shooting was accidental, Gurley’s death prompted heated reaction in both the local Brooklyn community and throughout the nation, further fueling the Black Lives Matter movement that had begun after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.