Woman killed by cop foresaw it happening
DEBORAH DANNER, after decades of struggling with her schizophrenia, saw a future fraught with peril: Suicide. Hospitalization. Death by a cop’s bullet.
This week, her dark vision — laid out in a prescient and poignant 2012 essay — came to pass.
The 66-year-old Bronx woman, writing about how misunderstood her illness remains, detailed the exact kind of NYPD showdown in which she was killed Tuesday night in her apartment.
“We are all aware of the all too frequent news stories about the mentally ill who come up against law enforcement instead of mental health professionals and end up dead,” she wrote in the sixpage paper. “We should all be aware that these circumstances represent very, very serious problems that need addressing.”
Danner even referenced the 1984 NYPD shooting of Eleanor Bumpurs — herself a 66-year-old, mentally ill Bronx woman killed by the NYPD inside her apartment.
That heavy-set senior citizen “was perceived as ‘a threat to the safety’ of several grown men who were also police officers,” Danner wrote.
Danner shared her “Living With Schizophrenia” essay in July 2015 with state Mental Hygiene Legal Service attorney Charles Hargreaves, who represented her in a guardianship case.
He pulled the essay out after hearing of Danner’s tragic death.
The lawyer said his client — who tried to maintain her independence despite her disease — was well aware of the risks presented by her illness.
“She was very afraid of exactly what happened,” said Hargreaves.
Danner, in her writings, referred to her schizophrenia as both “a curse” and her “blue funk.”
“I smile rarely, but I am surviving,” she wrote.
Family members said Danner’s struggles with mental illness dated to her college days, and she wrote about first slipping into the alternate reality of schizophrenia when she was nearly 30.
Her cousin Wallace Cooke Jr., 74, said both Danner’s mother and sister had tried to get her treatment over the decades. The NYPD was summoned to her Castle Hill home on four previous occasions before their final, fatal visit.
Sgt. Hugh Barry fatally shot Danner, who was holding a bat. He chose lethal force over a Taser, which he had on his belt. State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced Thursday that the Bronx district attorney would retain jurisdiction in the case. Both Mayor de Blasio and NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill said the sergeant who pulled the trigger was at fault.
“What’s clear in this instance is that we failed,” O’Neill said Wednesday.
But the exasperated head of the sergeants union blasted the decision to put Barry on modified duty.
“We train this way. This is what we shoot at,” Ed Mullins, head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, told reporters Thursday as he held up a target showing five men, one of whom is holding a bat, from the NYPD shooting range.
Despite her mental health woes, friends remembered Dan-