City deal with kin in 2007 off-duty shoot
THE CITY WILL pay $2 million to the family of a Bronx man who was shot dead by an NYPD officer a decade ago, the Daily News has learned.
Ten years, three months and seven days have passed since Fermin Arzu, a father of two, was killed by Officer Rafael Lora.
Arzu had collided with a parked car outside Lora’s Bronx home on May 18, 2007.
The off-duty cop ran out of his house armed with a gun and confronted Arzu at the corner of Hewitt Place and Westchester Ave.
Lora asked Arzu, 41, for his license. Arzu, who was drunk, put his car into drive and took off, dragging the officer.
The cop fired five shots at Arzu in self-defense, according to trial testimony in Bronx Supreme Court in 2009.
Arzu, a Honduran immigrant who worked as a maintenance man, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.17 — more than twice the legal limit of 0.08 — when he was killed.
Lora, 45, testified in his own defense and was convicted of second-degree manslaughter after a nonjury trial.
He was sentenced to one to three years in prison and was fired from the force.
A higher court overturned the conviction in 2011 on the grounds that Lora did not act recklessly. Then-District Attorney Robert Johnson vowed to appeal the decision, but Lora was not retried.
In the meantime, the Arzu family’s lawyers Sanford Rubenstein and Scott Rynecki filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city which settled for $2 million in June.
“This is a fair and reasonable civil settlement of damages for this wrongful death,” the lawyers said Thursday. Despite Lora’s ouster from the NYPD, his union lawyers were able to broker a deal with thenCommissioner Raymond Kelly, obtaining his reinstatement for one day so he could retire and collect his police pension, the Daily News reported in 2011.
Rubenstein and Rynecki also represented the family of Akai Gurley, who received a $4 million payout in August 2016.
Gurley was shot and killed in November 2014 by Officer Peter Liang inside a dimly lit stairwell of a public housing building in East New York, Brooklyn. Liang was convicted after a jury trial of second-degree manslaughter.
The trial judge reduced the conviction to criminally negligent homicide to avoid an appellate reversal and Liang was sentenced to 800 hours of community service.
“While the families received millions of dollars on the civil side, on criminal matters, families — in terms of holding officers accountable — it is more difficult to accomplish,” Rubenstein said.