NYPD bodycam and drone footage released Friday reveal the final moments before a knife-wielding nut lunged at police and was shotafter an hour-long standoff on the Brooklyn Bridge last month.
The footage captured 41-year-old Chaun Bottom — who was spotted walking along the bridge cables around 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 4 — as Detective Nicholas Giordani of the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit is seen climbing hundreds of feet above the East River and begging him to come down and drop his knife.
“What’s going on, man? What brought you up here,” Giordani asks.
“What’s going on in your day that you think this is the only option you have?” he says to Bottom.
Giordani desperately pleads with Bottom for around 50 minutes, asking the menace hanging off the side of the bridge what brought him up there.
“This is the last place I want you to be right now, man. Whatever’s going on in your life, we could talk about it, we could discuss it,” Giordani is heard saying in the footage.
“I don’t want to see you up here, I understand the view is nice but there’s no reason to be up here right now.”
At one point in the footage, the detective begs Bottom to come back toward the middle of the bridge rather than hanging off the side of it.
“Look man, I know you don’t know me, I get that, but I care about you more than you’re gonna know and I plan on spending however much time I can to show you that,” Giordani says.
“There is stuff left, you have your whole life ahead of you,” he pleads with Bottom. “Don’t say there’s nothing left, yes there is, I promise you there is plenty ahead of you.”
Toward the end of the encounter, Giordani spots Bottom’s weapon and asks him to drop it if he steps back.
The knife-wielding man is seen raising his weapon as he lunges toward the cop, with cops yelling at Bottom to “drop the knife.”
Sgt. Dennis Dooley, who was stationed on the bridge’s roadbed, then fired one shot, which struck the maniac.
Cops raced to get Bottom off the side of the bridge after he was shot and begged him to drop his weapon.
He was rushed to Bellevue Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
It was unclear from the footage what Bottom was telling the cop, but ESU Chief Gerard V. Dowling previously told reporters: “He stated, ‘I want to die, I want you to kill me, I have a bomb, you’re going to make me do something bad to the cops.”
The NYPD said its Force Investigation Division will continue to investigate and analyze the fatal shooting.
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