Outrage, Questions in Cops' Shooting of Groom

NEW YORK, Nov. 26, 2006 — -- A police shooting of a groom leaving a bachelor party in New York City is provoking outrage and prompting questions about when deadly force is justified.

Officers early Saturday fired 50 shots at three men who turned out to be unarmed. One of the three men died -- just hours before he was supposed to marry the mother of his two children.

On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered outside the hospital where two of the shooting victims were being treated.

The third, Sean Bell, 23, was shot four times in the torso and the throat, and died from gunshot wounds that punctured his larynx, lung and liver, according to the New York Medical Examiner's autopsy report.

The shooting happened outside a strip club in the New York City borough of Queens where the men had been celebrating Bell's upcoming wedding.

Investigators are trying to determine why five officers, some of them undercover, allegedly fired the 50 rounds at the men, and whether the officers used excessive force.

The strip club, called the Kalua Club, had been under police surveillance for other alleged illegal activity.

Many details about the shooting remained murky.

"I am all confused about what happened," said one protester. "I don't understand it. I am lost for words. I don't think it was right. I don't find it fair."

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the well-known New York community activist, has spent time with Bell's family.

"When you talk about 50 shots," Sharpton said, "I mean at what point do police understand that no one is shooting back at you?"

This is not the first controversial police shooting in New York City. In 1999, police shot and killed a young black man named Amadou Diallo, firing 41 times. Police said they thought he was reaching for a gun, but Diallo was unarmed. The incident sparked outrage and charges of racism in the New York Police Department.

The officers involved in this incident said they also had reason to believe the men were armed, but no weapon was found at the scene. Two officers who did not fire their guns have told police investigators that another officer, also undercover, had overheard the men saying they had a gun in their car.