A New York City police sergeant was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter on Friday for the 2023 death of a Bronx man whom the officer hit with a cooler as he fled on a motorbike. The sergeant, Erik Duran, was the first New York Police Department officer in a decade to be convicted in the on-duty death of a civilian.
Judge Guy H. Mitchell found Sergeant Duran, 38, guilty in the death of the man, Eric Duprey, 30, who sped off after selling $20 worth of cocaine to an undercover detective. The officer then threw a cooler at Mr. Duprey, knocking him off the bike and into a parked Jeep.
Sergeant Duran, who requested that a judge decide the case instead of a jury, was found not guilty of criminally-negligent homicide. He is expected to return to court on March 19 for sentencing, and faces up to 15 years behind bars. Shortly after the verdict, Sergeant Duran was fired in accordance with state law, the Police Department said in a statement.
The verdict was a rare conviction of a New York City police officer for the death of a civilian while on the job. Since April 2021, a special unit of the state attorney general’s office has taken over reviewing all the cases when an officer has caused the death of a civilian. The unit has looked into 72 killings involving the Police Department, and charged seven New York City police officers. While three officers have been convicted, they were all for deaths that happened while they were off-duty.
Sergeant Duran was the first officer convicted in the death of civilian while on duty since February 2016, when Officer Peter Liang was found guilty of manslaughter in the shooting of Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn stairwell.
On Friday afternoon, dozens of police officers, activists and family members had packed the Bronx courtroom to hear the verdict in Sergeant Duran’s trial.
Moments after it was read, the officer hung his head. His lawyers, Andrew Quinn and John D’Alessandro, looked at one another in disbelief. Sergeant Duran’s relatives cried and his colleagues, most of them members of the Bronx narcotics unit, sat in silence.
Across the aisle, Mr. Duprey’s partner, Pearl Velez, the mother of two of his three children, wept as anti-police-brutality activists who had attended almost every day of the 10-day trial smiled and shook one another’s hands.
After the proceeding, Jonathan Roberts, a lawyer who represents Mr. Duprey’s family, said the family plans to file a wrongful-death lawsuit in civil court seeking damages.
“A life was lost because a police officer made a dangerous and unjustifiable decision during a nonviolent encounter,” he said, adding, “While no verdict can bring their loved one back, accountability matters.”
Among the officers in the court was Sergeant Vincent Vallelong, the president of the city’s sergeants’ union, who sat through most of the trial. He said in a statement later that the judge’s decision “was a miscarriage of justice.”
“Verdicts such as this send a terrible message to hard-working cops” who use force to defend themselves or others, he added. “We vigorously maintain Sergeant Duran’s innocence.”
Judge Mitchell, a former Bronx prosecutor, was appointed in 2015 by Mayor Bill de Blasio and reappointed by Mayor Eric Adams in 2022. In court on Friday, he said prosecutors had “proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant’s actions were not justified.”
The victim, Mr. Duprey, who was Latino, and his family has received support from the Greater New York chapter of Black Lives Matter. Hawk and Chivona Newsome, siblings and the chapter’s co-founders, sat through each day of testimony.
As they left the courtroom, Mr. Newsome pumped his fist in the air. “All power to the people,” he shouted, leading a chant among activists who oppose police brutality.
Outside of the courthouse, Ms. Velez held a cardboard cutout of Mr. Duprey, beaming. His mother, Gretchen Soto, said in Spanish that she was taken aback by the verdict and “grateful to God for justice.”
“He was my everything,” Ms. Soto said. “He wasn’t what they said he was up there. He was a human being like everyone else.”
From the start of the trial, the defense attorneys had argued that Sergeant Duran was justified when he made a split-second decision to throw a red Igloo cooler at Mr. Duprey to protect other officers standing on the sidewalk, and in the path of the speeding motorbike.
On Monday, Sergeant Duran was called to the stand by his lawyers, a highly unusual strategy because defense attorneys worry that their clients could incriminate themselves.
Sergeant Duran told Judge Mitchell that he “didn’t have time to think” that day.
“I thought he was going to kill my guys, he was going so fast,” Sergeant Duran said of Mr. Duprey. “He was going to crash right into them.”
On Friday, he left the courtroom without speaking to reporters. Edmund Small, the vice president of the city’s sergeants’ union, who had been present almost every day, walked beside him, his arm around his shoulder.
Chelsia Rose Marcius is a criminal justice reporter for The Times, covering the New York Police Department.
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