Another unarmed black teenager has been killed by overzealous law enforcement officers, who “thought he had a gun.”
Ramarley Graham, 19, was shot in the chest by a plainclothes officer who chased Graham into his family’s home. No gun was found at the scene, cops said.
Graham was rushed to Montefiore Medical Center, where he later died.
“They chased him into the house,” said the teen’s mother, Constance Malcolm, 39, who witnessed her son being killed. “Nobody deserves to be shot in their own home.”
Officers from the NYPD’s Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit said they spotted Graham on the street adjusting his waistband and thought he had a gun, a police source said.
Graham — who had at least two prior arrests for marijuana and burglary — ran when cops tried to approach him, the sources said.
“He had some weed on him,” said a family friend. “It wasn’t a big deal. They shot him inside the house…He didn’t have a gun.”
It is not clear if Graham was aware the plainclothes officers were police when he ran from them. It is apparently a crime punishable by death to adjust your waistband if you are a black man in the Bronx. —kathleen cross
