Diallo Shot While Down, Jury Is Told

Several of the police bullets that hit Amadou Diallo struck him as he was falling or was on the ground, with one slug entering the bottom of his shoe, a medical examiner testified Tuesday at the murder trial of four New York City officers.

The trial of the white officers has focused on whether they thought the unarmed black man was a threat when they fired at him in the vestibule of his apartment building in the Bronx last year.

Using morgue photos and testifying in sometimes gruesome detail, Dr. Joseph Cohen showed jurors how the 19 bullets crisscrossed Diallo’s body from chest to toe.

Cohen said Diallo would have been paralyzed early in the shooting by a bullet that pierced his aorta and damaged his spinal cord. He said the same bullet would have caused Diallo to fall within two seconds.

By the time the last of 41 shots had been fired, another bullet had entered the bottom of Diallo’s right shoe and exited the top of a toe, Cohen said. He said several other bullets entered Diallo’s body while he was falling or already down.

“You couldn’t be upright to sustain [the toe wound] unless someone was underneath the floor shooting upward,” Cohen said.

Cohen, who now works with the Riverside County, Calif., medical examiner’s office, was the last of 12 prosecution witnesses. The defense was expected to begin its case today.

Kenneth Boss, 28, Sean Carroll, 36, Edward McMellon, 27, and Richard Murphy, 27, could get 25 years to life in prison if convicted.

Their lawyers contend Diallo, a West African immigrant, ignored police orders to halt, then pulled out a black wallet that appeared to be a gun.

They also say the bullets from the officers’ high-powered semiautomatic weapons were fired fast enough for Diallo to stay on his feet, possibly up against a wall, throughout the shooting.

On cross-examination, defense attorney Stephen Worth accused Cohen of “grasping at straws.” Cohen admitted he could not be certain which bullet hit Diallo first. He also conceded he made up to 20 revisions in his autopsy report.