The deadly stop began over an unfastened seatbelt.
Jonathan Rivera, then a sergeant with the New York Police Department, was patrolling near Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx on Oct. 17, 2019, when his partner saw that the driver of a Volkswagen Atlas did not appear to have a seatbelt on.
Sergeant Rivera and his partner pulled over the driver, Allan Feliz, ran his driver’s license and found several open warrants for failing to pay fines for spitting and littering. When the officers moved to pat him down, Mr. Feliz, 31, tried to drive away. As Sergeant Rivera’s partner struggled to pull Mr. Feliz out of the car, Sergeant Rivera tried to subdue him with a Taser.
Then, he shot Mr. Feliz once in the chest, killing him.
On Tuesday, Lieutenant Rivera, who was later promoted, testified during a departmental trial at Police Headquarters in Manhattan that will determine whether he should keep his job. He said he believed that he had to shoot Mr. Feliz to save his partner’s life.
“I feared the worst,” said Lieutenant Rivera. “I feared I had no other option.”
Prosecutors for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, New York City’s independent police oversight agency, have accused him of assault in the first degree and menacing in the second degree. Lieutenant Rivera has not been criminally charged, but the prosecutors said his actions should lead to his termination.
On that day, at 2:53 p.m., Lieutenant Rivera failed to follow his training or make sound tactical decisions, said Amanda Rodriguez, one of the board’s two prosecutors.
“Instead,” she said during her opening statement, “panic took the lead.”
The police are rarely challenged for shooting people in the line of duty. High-profile cases of brutality, including the death of George Floyd, brought a wave of promises from prosecutors who said they would move aggressively against officers who used deadly force. But charges have remained elusive, often because facts are ambiguous or cases lack stark evidence such as the citizen video of Minneapolis police officers killing Mr. Floyd.
Lieutenant Rivera’s case was not clear-cut, according to previous investigations.
His actions were reviewed by the department’s Force Investigations Division, which found that he had not violated guidelines, and the state attorney general’s office. That office concluded in September 2020 that Lieutenant Rivera’s partner, Officer Edward Barrett, was not in danger, but Lieutenant Rivera had “a reasonable perception — or at least not an obviously unreasonable one” that he had to shoot.
“We could not prove that the use of deadly force was unjustified beyond a reasonable doubt, as the law requires in order to bring charges,” Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement at the time.
But the oversight board, which has a lower standard of proof, pushed on, arguing that there was evidence to show that Lieutenant Rivera had violated the state’s penal code and should be fired.
During his testimony on Tuesday, Lieutenant Rivera said he had no choice but to shoot: “Had to move quick, had to act, had to get his hand off the drive shift.”
Mr. Feliz’s family, however, had no doubt about the lieutenant’s culpability. About 15 relatives packed the trial room, where videos taken from the officers’ body worn cameras were played repeatedly. Outside Police Headquarters, during a break in the trial, the family members held a news conference and called Lieutenant Rivera a killer.
“It’s just so hurtful to see my brother’s life be taken in that fashion,” said Samy Feliz, who stood with his mother, his sister and Mr. Feliz’s 5-year-old son, among others. “This is not fair. This is not justice.”
The case will be decided by Rosemarie Maldonado, the department’s deputy commissioner of trials and the administrative judge who presides over internal trials.
In videos showed during the trial on Tuesday, Lieutenant Rivera can be seen walking to the passenger side of Mr. Feliz’s car while Officer Barrett and another officer, Michele Almanzar, approach on the driver’s side.
The exchange between the officers and Mr. Feliz was friendly at first. Mr. Feliz, who was driving with a friend in the passenger side, complained about how poorly the Volkswagen handled in the snow and the officers chuckled.
But as soon as Officer Barrett saw the open warrants, he asked Mr. Feliz to step out of the car and said that he would have to pat him down. After briefly stepping out of the car, Mr. Feliz quickly got back in and tried to drive away.
Lieutenant Rivera immediately fired his Taser at Mr. Feliz, who howled in pain, as Officer Barrett tried to pull him from the car, striking him and pulling at his head.
Lieutenant Rivera, cursing, warned Mr. Feliz that he would shoot him and then lunged into the car, lying across the passenger, who had his hands up and begged not to be shot. Mr. Feliz put the car in drive and Officer Barrett, now a detective, managed to get out of the way as the car lurched forward and then back.
Lieutenant Rivera, 37, testified that he did not see his partner escape and was sure he would be caught under the wheel.
“At that moment, I feared that Detective Barrett was going to get dragged,” he said.
The officers later learned that Mr. Feliz had given them his brother’s driver’s license.
Mr. Feliz, who was on federal probation for drug-related charges, was in possession of cocaine and methamphetamine. He knew that if the officers found the drugs, he would be arrested and sent back to prison, said Philip Karasyk, one of Lieutenant Rivera’s lawyers.
“As a direct result of his behavior, and his behavior alone, Lieutenant Rivera was left with no choice, no reasonable alternative,” Mr. Karasyk said during his opening statement.
Ms. Rodriguez, the prosecutor, said that Mr. Feliz’s state of mind was not relevant because the officers had no idea he was in possession of drugs or on probation.
“We are not here to victim blame,” she said.
Despite not bringing charges, Ms. James’s office said it had “serious concerns” with how the police had handled the encounter. The office made several recommendations, including that officers should not dive into a vehicle when the driver is still in control and that they should not display a firearm and threaten to kill someone “unless the use of such force is otherwise justifiable.”
“We believe that, going forward, the adoption of these recommendations would significantly limit the likelihood of the kind of escalation that resulted in Mr. Feliz’s death,” the office said in a final report on the shooting.
Prosecutors presented one witness: Marc Brown, a former police officer from South Carolina who is now an instructor on the use of force. He agreed with the attorney general’s assessment.
Mr. Brown, who said he had reviewed the video footage, said the shooting was not justified.
Lieutenant Rivera unnecessarily put himself in jeopardy by lunging into the car, while the other officers should have concentrated on grabbing Mr. Feliz’s hands, a much better way of controlling him than striking him or using the Taser, Mr. Brown said.
The next option, once the officers had failed to get Mr. Feliz out of the car, was to let him go.
“It’s not worth it,” Mr. Brown said. “If you’re not going to win the vehicle extraction, letting him go is your next best option.”
James Moschella, one of Lieutenant Rivera’s lawyers, said that letting Mr. Feliz drive off, possibly at high speed, could have endangered others, including children who were about to be let out of school.
“Isn’t that a risk in and of itself?” he said. Mr. Moschella then asked whether two reasonable officers could not have reached different conclusions about how to handle someone like Mr. Feliz.
“Isn’t Lieutenant Rivera’s opinion entitled to as much weight as yours?” Mr. Moschella asked.
“That’s not for me to decide,” Mr. Brown replied.
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