Anger in streets
Hundreds rally as 5 cops put on leave and DA sets probe
BY ALISON GENDAR, SCOTT SHIFREL and BILL HUTCHINSON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Al Sharpton holds hands with Nicole Paultre, the fiance of Sean Bell, during yesterday's rally.
Protester gets up on undercover police cruiser outside 103rd Precinct stationhouse in Queens to join outcry over death of Sean Bell. Below, a protester yells at a police officer.
Five cops involved in the fatal shooting of an unarmed bridegroom on his wedding day were put on administrative leave yesterday as prosecutors prepared to take the case to a grand jury.
The new developments came as hundreds of furious protesters, led by the dead man's bride-to-be and his weeping 3-year-old daughter, took to the streets.
"It is like the Wild, Wild West," said Bishop Lester Williams, who was supposed to preside at the wedding of Sean Bell to Nicole Paultre.
"Fifty shots, and no one is shooting back at you? That's an execution. It's like putting them in front of a firing line."
Bell, 23, was shot in the neck and killed when plainclothes cops unloaded 50 shots on his Nissan Altima after his bachelor party at a Queens strip club.
His friends, Joseph Guzman, 31, and Trent Benefield, 23, were wounded in the 4 a.m. incident outside the Kalua Cabaret on 94th Ave. in Jamaica.
As outrage at the shootings of the three unarmed black men swelled, city officials scrambled to respond.
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown was preparing to present evidence to a grand jury "in the next few days," a source said. He is to meet this morning with a homicide investigator and the head of his investigations unit to review the Saturday morning bloodshed, the source said.
The NYPD, meanwhile, put the five officers who fired on paid administrative leave and asked them to surrender their weapons.
The names of the officers were not released, and none of them have been interviewed by investigators. Mayor Bloomberg, who spoke to the 22-year-old Paultre on Saturday, has arranged a meeting today with community leaders at City Hall to discuss the shooting.
Bloomberg, believed to have been at his Bermuda home over the weekend, spent yesterday calling or e-mailing black leaders, including Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem), the Rev. Floyd Flake and former Mayor David Dinkins. "He said he was doing everything he could to find out what happened," City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-Queens) said of Bloomberg. "He wanted to assure me he was engaged, involved, and that we would get to the bottom of what happened."
New details about the sequence of events emerged yesterday.
Friends of Bell, Benefield and Guzman told cops the trio mistook the plainclothes officers conducting surveillance at the club for robbers and tried to get away.
Bell clipped an undercover officer who was on foot with his car and then twice rammed into the cops' unmarked minivan - and the cops opened fire, police said.
The undercover cop fired the first shot, followed by 10 more rounds, a law enforcement source said. A white plainclothes detective who was in the rammed van got out and fired 31 shots, stopping to reload.
The second officer in the van fired three times.
A lieutenant overseeing the surveillance operation who was in an unmarked Toyota Camry ducked down behind the dashboard when the first shots rang out, thinking he was under fire, a source said.
Two officers riding with the lieutenant got out of the Camry and opened fire, police said.
One, a 17-year veteran, fired four times, while the other officer, who has nine years on the force, fired once, police said.
Two of the officers are white, two are black and one is Hispanic.
Kelly said statements an undercover officer overheard inside the club led police to believe the men were going to retrieve a weapon. No gun was found in Bell's car.
Trini Wright, 28, a dancer at the club, insisted the cops opened fire without identifying themselves. She was planning to go with Bell and his friends to a diner and was putting her makeup bag in the trunk of their car when the cops' minivan appeared.
"The minivan came around the corner and smashed into their car. And they [the cops] jumped out shooting," Wright told The News. "No 'stop.' No 'freeze.' No nothing."
The police were looking for signs of prostitution and drugs at the club when the shooting broke out. But supporters of the three shot men said there was no excuse for what transpired.
"We cannot allow this to continue to happen," said the Rev. Al Sharpton outside Mary Immaculate Hospital, where Guzman was in critical condition and Benefield was in stable condition.
"We've got to understand that all of us were in that car," Sharpton told about 300 protesters, who chanted, "No justice, no peace!" and counted to 50 to represent the number of shots fired.
The protesters marched several blocks to the hospital from Community Church of Christ, where a service was held earlier. During the march, Paultre collapsed and had to be supported by people surrounding her.
