Cop: She was like slugger
An NYPD sergeant stepped out of the witness box in Bronx court Tuesday, took off his suit jacket and adopted a batter’s stance — to show how a deranged woman allegedly came at him with a bat before he shot her dead.
“She is swinging like a baseball player would swing,’’ testified Sgt. Hugh Barry, the first on-duty city cop to be charged with murder since the infamous police killing of Amadou Diallo in 1999.
“At that point, I’m looking at the bat. I just saw the bat swinging, and I fired,” Barry said.
Deborah Danner was struck in the center of her chest by both of Barry’s bullets — a tragic end to a frenzied encounter with the schizophrenic woman that lasted just five minutes from start to finish.
Barry — speaking publicly for the first time since the October 2016 shooting — said Danner was simply “too fast for me,’’ insisting he had to shoot the 66-year-old to prevent her from bashing his head in.
“I just see the bat swinging, and that’s when I fired,’’ Barry said. “I’m looking at this bat that can crack me in the head and kill me.”
The sergeant said he was first brought to the home by a 911 call for a violent “EDP,” or emotionally disturbed person. He rode the elevator up to Danner’s apartment with her sister, who had been called to the scene by another officer.
When he got inside the home, Barry said he saw an- other officer trying to calm down Danner, who was sitting on the bed holding “metal scissors’’ and cutting paper “aggressively.”
“He didn’t seem like he was having much success with her,’’ Barry said of the other cop.
“Let me give it a shot,” he told him.
“She looked at me, and she held the scissors like this,’’ Barry said, acting out Danner pointing the scissors at him.
Danner put down the scissors but suddenly ran back into her bedroom and “jumped onto the edge of the bed,’’ he said.
Barry said he remembered her “out of nowhere grabbing a baseball bat.”
When she rushed him, he shot her, he said.
The sergeant, in his 2¹/2 hours on the stand, got up twice out of the witness box, once for the defense and once for the prosecution, to demonstrate how he said Danner held the bat like a baseball player.
Asked if he intended to kill Danner, Barry said, “Absolutely not.”