‘HE HAS A GUN’
Moment mentally ill man killed by cops threatened kid
Video and 911 calls show that Saheed Vassell threatened at least three people with a “gun” — really a pipe — in Crown Heights before police officers shot him dead.
A Brooklyn man was caught on camera terrorizing passers-by with a silver object that 911 callers believed was a gun moments before he was shot and killed by cops, the NYPD said Thursday.
A 50-second video posted on the department’s Twitter page includes three clips in which Saheed Vassell, 34, is seen pointing the object at people as he walks along the sidewalk.
In the first snippet, Vassell extends both arms and lunges at someone pushing a shopping cart, sticking the metal tube in the person’s face.
The second clip shows Vassell veering across the sidewalk to point the pipe at a person walking hand-in-hand with a child.
In the third, he walks up to a man, puts his left hand on the back of the man’s neck and sticks the object in his chest.
A fourth clip shows Vassell approach a corner and assume a combat stance as he points the pipe with both hands toward the intersection.
“At this point, responding officers discharged their weapons,” reads text printed on the screen.
According to the NYPD, four cops fired a total of 10 rounds at Vassell at the corner of Utica Avenue and Montgomery Street in Crown Heights shortly after three 911 callers reported a man with a gun in the area at 4:40 p.m. Wednesday.
The city Medical Examiner’s Office said on Thursday that Vassell was hit by seven to nine bullets and suffered fatal wounds to his brain, aorta and spinal cord.
The video clips were recorded by private surveillance cameras and were edited to pan and zoom in on the pipe protruding from Vassell’s fist. The NYPD declined to release the raw footage.
Cops have not determined exactly what Vassell was holding, but a high-ranking police source said it appeared to be a car part.
The NYPD video is interspersed with text of the 911 calls.
“There is a guy in a brown jacket walking around pointing — I don’t know, (to someone else) what is he pointing in people’s face? They say it’s a gun, it’s silver,” one quote reads.
Another, attributed to a different caller, says, “There’s a guy walking around the street. He looks like he’s crazy but he’s pointing something at people that looks like a gun and he’s like popping it as if, like if he’s pulling the trigger.”
A worker at the Yahya Hardware
Store, where a camera recorded a man recoiling as Vassell pointed the pipe at his face, said Vassell often wandered the shop’s aisles.
The worker, who gave his name as Marwan, said Vassell was “all the time drunk, crazy” and “would jump to your face sometime.”
“If you don’t know him,” Marwan recalled, “he was scary.”
“He’d say, ‘I am Saheed. I will kill everybody.’ ”
Vassell’s father, Eric, 63, accused cops of opening fire on his son without warning.
“They came to kill this kid,” he told The Post with tears in his eyes.
“The police didn’t even talk to him . . . That’s all basic training. Why didn’t they do that for my son? Why didn’t they say, ‘Hey, Mister, put your hands up’?”
The NYPD declined to say if the cops gave any warnings.
Meanwhile, a few hundred pro- testers rallied in Crown Heights Thursday night to decry the shooting, with some urging people not to call 911 in certain situations.
Some marched down Empire Boulevard toward the 71st Precinct station house shouting, “NYPD! KKK! How many kids did you kill today?” and other slogans.
None of the cops who responded to Wednesday’s 911 calls — including one who didn’t open fire — was wearing body cameras, which record audio.
The NYPD has been outfitting cops with body cams since a federal judge ordered a trial of the technology in 2013. The NYPD plans to have all patrol officers wearing them by the year’s end.
Vassell lived in a two-bedroom apartment with his parents, brother and sister.
The building’s superintendent said Vassell hoarded scraps of metal and other junk on the roof.
“I saw him carrying in items at all hours of the day . . . He saw these things on the street and would pick them up,” said Blanca Martinez, 44.
State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation into the incident. An executive order issued by Gov. Cuomo in 2015 appoints the AG as a special prosecutor in police killings of unarmed civilians.
Mayor de Blasio pledged the city’s full cooperation, calling Vassell’s death “a tragedy by any measure.”
“Look, I understand why this is so painful to people,” he said.
“That is an exceedingly, difficult tense split-second decision that has to be made,” he added.