A man on a motorbike skirted around three New York Police Department narcotics detectives who had failed to catch him after he sold an undercover officer drugs.
The man, Eric Duprey, 30, was speeding on the sidewalk of Aqueduct Avenue near West 192nd Street when Sgt. Erik Duran, who supervised a Bronx narcotics unit, grabbed a heavy cooler from a nearby picnic table and hurled it at him. Mr. Duprey lost control of the motorbike, slammed into a tree and was flung into a parked vehicle with enough force to shake it. Mr. Duprey was pronounced dead minutes later.
A judge heard opening statements on Wednesday in Bronx Supreme Court about whether Sergeant Duran, 38, was justified when he heaved the cooler at Mr. Duprey on Aug. 23, 2023. The officer is charged with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and assault in connection to Mr. Duprey’s death.
Prosecutors told the judge, Guy Mitchell, that Sergeant Duran recklessly threw the cooler to stop Mr. Duprey after the narcotics unit had botched its efforts to arrest him. It was the first time the prosecutors had described a motive for Sergeant Duran’s actions. One of his lawyers argued that he made his decision to save lives.
Neither the prosecutors nor lawyers for Sergeant Duran disagreed on how that day in the Bronx unfolded. But lawyers on both sides told Judge Mitchell that the surveillance video and footage taken from the officers’ body-worn cameras would support their narratives.
Sergeant Duran, who has been with the Police Department for 16 years, was already “flustered” that three detectives had failed to stop Mr. Duprey, said Angel Chiohh, one of the assistant attorneys general prosecuting the case. “He was annoyed because the operation was not going as planned.”
“The defendant wasn’t scared for his life or the lives of anyone else,” she continued. The sergeant, she added, “had many options that day on how to manage Mr. Duprey’s arrest and he chose violence.”
Andrew C. Quinn, one of Sergeant Duran’s lawyers, said the officer had “2.5 seconds” to make a “life-or-death” decision that ultimately saved a woman and two other detectives who he said were in the path of the motorbike.
“Eric Duprey died that day because he made a series of bad decisions,” he added. “We don’t teach officers to run into burning buildings, but they do. We don’t teach officers to throw coolers. But when that is the only way to save a life, that is what they do.”
Sergeant Duran is the first New York City police officer in nearly a decade to be tried for killing someone while on duty. It is rare for a Police Department officer to face criminal charges in a civilian death and even more rare for those charges to lead to a conviction.
On Wednesday, the fourth-floor courtroom inside the Bronx Hall of Justice was packed. Sergeant Duran’s relatives and nearly two dozen officers, many of them in the city’s sergeants union and the narcotics unit, sat in the rows behind the defense table.
Almost as many activists were across the aisle, including members of Black Lives Matter Greater New York and Open Police Archives, an anti-police brutality organization. They sat with relatives of Mr. Duprey, including his mother, Gretchen Soto, who wore a round medallion that held her son’s picture, and his partner, Pearl Velez.
Ms. Velez wept as prosecutors described Mr. Duprey’s head injuries. Later, when Mr. Quinn told the court that his client “wasn’t trying to hurt Mr. Duprey,” she looked up and vigorously shook her head.
Mr. Quinn described Sergeant Duran as a “son of the Bronx,” who was raised there by his parents, who were Ecuadorean immigrants.
On Aug. 23, he and his unit were making arrests and conducting several buy-and-busts, operations to catch unsuspecting drug dealers, around the Bronx. They decided to make another stop on Aqueduct Avenue, on a stretch of grass where children often play and people walk their dogs.
One of the detectives bought drugs from Mr. Duprey and then went to tell the rest of the unit members they were clear to arrest him, Ms. Chiohh said. Instead, they began arresting someone else, giving Mr. Duprey a chance to flee on the motorbike. She noted that none of the other detectives who had tried to stop Mr. Duprey used force.
Sergeant Duran threw the cooler “not to save lives, not because he was scared, but to save an arrest,” Ms. Chiohh said.
After the first day of the trial ended, Ms. Velez spoke outside of the courthouse to reporters. For her, it had been a long ordeal.
“He’s never said anything,” she said, referring to Sergeant Duran. “He’s never apologized. He’s never even looked at me.”
Maria Cramer is a Times reporter covering the New York Police Department and crime in the city and surrounding areas.
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