N.Y.P.D. Says Police Officer Accidentally Fired Gun Inside Columbia Building
Footage of the shooting was captured on the officer’s body camera and provided to the Manhattan district attorney. The officer was on the first floor of Hamilton Hall when his gun went off.
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Officer Accidentally Fired a Gun at Columbia University, N.Y.P.D. Says
The police said a sergeant unintentionally fired his gun into an empty room of Hamilton Hall while officers were removing pro-Palestinian protesters from the building.
While clearing an unoccupied, vacant area of the building on the first floor, one E.S.U. member, a sergeant, did unintentionally discharge one round from his firearm. The sergeant was attempting to assist other officers in gaining entry to a locked office to make sure there was no one hiding inside. The team gained access to the office and found that there was nobody inside. In this case, the bullet landed on the floor of the office and didn’t travel anywhere else, so it was apparent that it had struck no one. At no time were any police officers, members of the public or any protesters in danger. This was purely unintentional. The sergeant at the time was trying to clear an area, an unknown location, that was dark. So he moved. He made the decision to transition his firearm from his dominant hand to his non-dominant hand so he could better try to gain access to the office. With that, he unintentionally pulled the trigger of his weapon and discharged the firearm. Moving forward, we we will obviously counsel the officer and send him to retraining and reevaluate him.
A police sergeant’s gun “accidentally” fired inside a Columbia University building where officers were removing pro-Palestinian protesters from the campus this week, the New York Police Department said on Friday.
The sergeant had broken the glass of a locked office on the first floor of the building and switched his firearm — a 9-millimeter handgun with a flashlight mounted on it — from his right hand to his left hand to reach through the broken glass to unlock the door from the inside, said Carlos Valdez, assistant chief of the Emergency Services Unit.
As he switched hands, the gun went off. The bullet traveled through the glass, hit a frame of a wall and landed on the floor, the police said.
“After the firearm discharged, the sergeant immediately assessed his team and ensured that nobody was injured,” Chief Valdez said. “The team gained access to the office and found that nobody was inside.”
All of the protesters had been moved to one area of the first floor, but the police did not know at the time whether anyone was inside the locked office before they entered, officials said on Friday.
The unidentified officer, who Chief Valdez said was “very experienced” and had been a sergeant with the unit for eight years, will receive training and be re-evaluated, he said.
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