Facts Are Clear: A Black Man Is Dead; but the Truth is Elusive : Oakland: Family and neighbors say an innocent man was killed protecting his home. Officers contend they fired in self-defense. They broke down the door during a credit-card fraud investigation, but they found nothing.

Nathan Roy Cosby is dead. He was shot in the back of the head by a police officer during a raid on his home. He was not a suspect in any crime.

Those are facts.

The truth is more complicated.

The truth, say Cosby’s family and neighbors, is that an innocent black man was gunned down protecting his home.

The truth, says the Oakland Police Department, is that the officer fired in self-defense after Cosby aimed a loaded handgun at him.

The truth is about race. It’s about a gulf of fear and misunderstanding that divides some American police departments and the communities they’re sworn to protect and to serve.

The truth is that Roy Cosby, at age 32, is dead.

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The officers who battered down the door of 9950 Longfellow Ave. on Jan. 6 weren’t looking for Roy Cosby. According to court documents, they were looking for clothes they believed Cosby’s wife, Melinda, had bought with stolen credit cards.

Twelve to 15 officers blocked off the quiet East Oakland street and surrounded Cosby’s gray, one-story bungalow just after 7 a.m. They had a search warrant for the house and a car parked outside.

But there were no stolen goods there, just Cosby and his two Rottweilers. Melinda Cosby and the couple’s 6-year-old daughter, Donita, were sleeping at a relative’s house.

The night before, Cosby had worked until 10:30 p.m., his regular shift as an Oakland Unified School District janitor. His bedroom was in the back of the house; neighbors and family say he slept late.

A few minutes before 7:30 a.m., as neighbors prepared for work, the entry team moved in.

Karen Gill, Cosby’s next-door neighbor, got out of bed to investigate a strange rumbling when a single gunshot came from the back of the house. As she ran to her son’s bedroom, she heard men running and shouting. It seemed like they were everywhere.

“They were on both sides of my house. They were in my back yard. It sounded like they were on the roof,” she said.

A little while later, she heard more shots.

Within minutes, more than 30 police officers and federal agents converged on the neighborhood, said Leo Bazile, an attorney and former Oakland city councilman who lives across the street.

The entry team members wore blue jumpsuits, bulletproof vests and knit hats. Some carried shields. Some had guns strapped to their chests with Velcro strips.

“They were just like you see them on television or in the newsreels,” Bazile said. “These guys were dressed for combat.”

What had happened? Oakland police say several officers knocked at the front door, identified themselves and announced they were serving a warrant.

They say Officer Eric Belker was in an adjacent back yard when Cosby opened the kitchen window 15 to 25 feet away. Cosby held his loaded semiautomatic handgun, police say.

“He looked at the officer, looked away. That’s when he looked back, said something and pointed the gun,” said Lt. Clyde Sims, whose homicide investigation found no evidence a crime occurred.

At that moment, the entry team broke down the front door and Belker fired a single shot from his semiautomatic pistol, Sims said. The bullet entered the back of Cosby’s head and lodged in his brain.

“It’s possible when that door went in, he turned to look and that’s when Belker fired,” Sims said.

Police say they then were attacked by one of Cosby’s dogs. The animal was killed with three shotgun blasts.

The paramedics wheeled out Roy Cosby and took him to Highland Hospital. He was dead on arrival at 8:04 a.m.

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The bottom line . . .

Lt. Peter Peterson, Oakland Police Department:

“We had no idea who Mr. Cosby was when he came to the window. . . . We had no idea who he was when he pointed a gun at the officer. . . . If he had just opened the door when we asked him to, if he hadn’t had a weapon in his hand, you wouldn’t be asking me all those questions. . . . The bottom line is, we had no idea who he was.”

Roy’s older brother, Robert Cosby:

“Sure, there are two ways of seeing everything: the police officers’ way and the victim’s way. . . . But there’s a bottom line here. An innocent man was killed. That’s the bottom line.”

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John Burris, the Cosbys’ attorney, believes Roy Cosby slept through the warnings and was awakened by his dogs barking and police banging at the door: “He hears all this commotion, gets up, gets his gun, goes to the window. He can’t see anything and he turns his head to go and he gets whacked.”

That Roy Cosby had a gun is beside the point, critics say. The point, they say, is that police never should have launched the raid.

Burris and others say police would have handled matters differently in a neighborhood that wasn’t overwhelmingly black.

If it had been elsewhere, Burris said, “Mr. Cosby would be alive and well. . . . He would have gotten the benefit of the doubt. There would have been efforts to communicate with him.”

Critics say the shooting reflects a pattern of “blue-on-black” violence that continues, though Oakland’s mayor and police chief are black.

“It’s disturbing to me that in a city where we have black people in a position of power that we have the same problems we had before they got there,” Burris said.

He cited two recent shootings of young men as examples of police officers’ “reckless disregard for the lives of black people.”

In one, a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer shot an unarmed 19-year-old in the back as he walked away during questioning in the theft of a radio. In the other, a 19-year-old who had two guns was shot in the back while fleeing Oakland police.

This is not a new issue, of course--for years, American blacks have complained that they are often victims of police. In March, a Boston SWAT team raided the wrong apartment and, as a result, a 75-year-old retired minister, a black man, died of a heart attack.

Nationwide, FBI figures show 415 suspects killed by officers in 1992, up from 367 in 1991 and 385 in 1990. But the bureau’s reliance on voluntary data makes it impossible to say how much higher the actual numbers are, said William Geller, co-author of “Deadly Force: What We Know.”

Geller’s research shows that police use of deadly force declined from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, when many departments instituted new guidelines under public pressure.

Before that, overly broad policies allowed officers to shoot at unarmed fleeing felony suspects. Now, officers generally must show they fired to protect their lives or the lives of others.

Blacks are being killed disproportionately--in 1990, they made up 35% of the victims, more than triple their percentage of the overall population--but Geller warns against easy conclusions.

Still, perception is important.

“If you have a substantial proportion of the black community believing the police have two standards,” Geller said, “then that’s a problem the police have to deal with.”

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Court documents never mentioned Roy Cosby as a suspect in the fraud investigation that brought police to his house--one of three for which they had obtained search warrants.

They also searched an Oakland house where Melinda Cosby’s father lived, and a third house at which Pleasanton detectives believed she had bought stolen credit cards. At that house, they say, lived a man with a lengthy history of “theft, violence, and weapons offenses.”

That violent history is why Oakland police used entry teams, Lt. Peterson said. Police expected trouble at the third house, he said, but believed the man living there possibly could be at the Cosbys’.

They never encountered him. And they didn’t find any contraband at Cosby’s or at his father-in-law’s, though three stolen credit cards turned up at the third address.

No criminal charges have been filed against Melinda Cosby in connection with the searches, and she denies involvement in illegal activities.

The police department placed Belker, the officer who killed Cosby, on administrative leave for three days before returning him to active duty.

The death of Roy Cosby, the first person shot by the Oakland entry team since 1976, has prompted continuing investigations by a police shooting board and the Alameda County district attorney.

In a Feb. 4 statement, Mayor Elihu Harris called Roy Cosby’s death “tragic.” But he fell short of heeding calls for an independent investigation, saying he was confident the internal review would be “fair, objective, and comprehensive.”

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When Melinda and Roy Cosby bought the small house on Longfellow Avenue four years ago, their relatives pitched in to fix it up.

For six months, the couple stripped and sanded floors, put in new windows, redid the bathroom and kitchen and painted until the single-story home looked as neat as the other houses on the block.

“We all helped out to get the house the way he wanted it,” Robert Cosby said. “I was really proud of him. My whole family was. This is how we were raised. Home is everything to us--taking care of it, protecting it. That’s how he was killed.”

Two months after his death, Melinda Cosby said goodby to her house. Earlier that day, she discussed the anger she could not put aside.

“It’s just a thing where, you know, this whole business is so unexplainable. . . . A lot of things go through my head. I have sleepless nights. I cry a lot. I think I’m meaner now. I get frustrated.

“I miss my husband tremendously.”

Arriving with a niece on a sunlit spring day, she seemed reluctant to go into the house. She smoked a cigarette, visited briefly with her old neighbor, Karen Gill, drove to her daughter’s nearby school and returned with her mother.

Finally, she went inside and put away some protest signs. The house was empty, waiting for renters. The floors still sparkled, the walls looked bright and freshly painted.

On her way out, she took down a wreath from the battered front door. Ringed by white and gold fabric flowers was a picture of a beaming Roy Cosby and one of his dogs.

She put the wreath in the car and drove off.