Omar J. Edwards’s mother did not like the idea of her son becoming a police officer. But he joined the New York Police Department anyway, nearly two years ago.
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Michael Nagle for The New York Times
Officer Omar J. Edwards's father, Ricardo Edwards, leaving his son's home.
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The Sequence of Events in the Police ShootingInteractive Graphic
The Sequence of Events in the Police Shooting
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Officer Omar J. Edwards and his family in a Facebook photo.
Then he fell in love and married a woman whose father had been an officer in one of the tougher precincts in Brooklyn.
Officer Edwards, 25, like many new graduates of the Police Academy, had been assigned most recently to an Impact Response Team: new officers and seasoned supervisors who flood specific areas where there are spikes in crime.
On Thursday night, he was scheduled to work in Harlem from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., but he received permission to leave early, and did so shortly after 10 p.m.
Officer Andrew P. Dunton, 30, had been with the department for four and a half years. A raft of felony arrests had earned him a place on an anti-crime unit in Harlem’s 25th Precinct. He had never fired his weapon.
These two officers — early in their careers, fighting crime in a city that had become significantly safer than in decades past — encountered each other shortly after 10:30 p.m.
Both had guns in their hands. Neither was in uniform. And within a matter of seconds, they became the latest pairing in one of the most wrenching of police confrontations: Officer Dunton, mistaking Officer Edwards for a threat, shot him dead.
Police Department investigators and Manhattan prosecutors have begun what is likely to be an intensive investigation into what went wrong.
According to the preliminary accounts, Officer Edwards, who was black, drew his weapon after encountering and racing after a man who was breaking into his car around the corner from the police station he worked from, on East 123rd Street; Officer Dunton, one of three white officers in an unmarked police car patrolling the neighborhood, saw him racing down the street with his pistol in the air, and emerged from the car to shout, “Police! Drop the gun.”
Officer Edwards, according to the account, turned to face his unwitting colleagues, his gun pointed their way.
Several witnesses told the police that Officer Edwards never said a word. But one witness, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case, said Officer Edwards might have managed to begin to say one word — “Police.”
If history is a guide, a grand jury will consider possible charges against Officer Dunton. There will be calls for reform of procedures to better protect minority officers, who have most often paid the price for such cases of mistaken identity. And Officer Edwards and Officer Dunton will have their sad places in the latest chapter of a familiar police disaster.
As the investigation of the shooting got under way, little information emerged about Officer Dunton, who has been placed on administrative duty, and who has been assigned a lawyer by his union.
A police official said Officer Dunton, the son of Long Island schoolteachers and a former soccer player at Siena College, had made 104 arrests in his career, including 71 for felonies, several of them for gun possession.
In the minutes after the shooting, Emergency Service Unit officers arrived and began tending to Officer Edwards. After rolling him over and removing an outer shirt or jacket, they saw that he was wearing a Police Academy T-shirt and then found his shield in his pocket, the police said.
When Officer Dunton learned that he had just fired on a fellow officer, he was shattered, said a person familiar with the accounts of the two officers who had been riding with him.
“He took this news very hard,” said the person. “The color drained from his face, he was shell-shocked, in disbelief. He was physically shaking. You never want to shoot your gun, and when you shoot your gun and find out it’s a guy on your own team, it’s devastating.”
In interviews with Officer Edwards’s friends and relatives, a picture emerged of a quiet but determined man, who had graduated from high school, taken some college courses, but then committed to the Police Department.
Officer Edwards’s father, Ricardo Edwards, said the police force had been his son’s dream since he was growing up in Brooklyn.
“He was that kind of boy and that kind of adult: He never got mixed up in any trouble, in anything bad,” Mr. Edwards said.
s’s mother did not like the idea of her son becoming a police officer. But he joined the New York Police Depart
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