Teen Killed by Cops Had Brush, Not Gun

Nov. 13, 2007 — -- A Brooklyn, N.Y., teenager apparently armed only with a hairbrush who died in a hail of 20 police bullets Monday night is heard screaming "I got a gun and I'm gonna shoot you," on a 911 recording released this afternoon by the New York Police Department.

Khiel Coppin repeatedly threatened to "do something bad" and was talking about suicide yesterday morning, prompting his mother to call an interfaith crisis center for assistance, according to a press conference by NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly. He added that Coppin had previously been hospitalized at Kings County Hospital psychiatric ward and was taking anti-psychotic drugs.

When crisis center workers arrived at the apartment in a public housing project in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the 18-year-old African-American man had already left, said Kelly. When Coppin returned to the apartment, he refused his mother's requests to leave, picked up a tape dispenser, put it under his shirt and said he was "prepared to die," according to the commissioner.

That prompted his mother, Denise Owens, to call 911 on which a young man can be heard shouting "I got a f----- gun."

According to Kelly's account, police officers arrived at the apartment to find Coppin in the front hallway holding a knife in each hand, while his mother and her 11-year-old daughter stood nearby. He told officers that he was armed with a gun, lunging towards them and saying, "Shoot me, kill me!," says Kelly.

Coppin then moved to a bedroom at the back of the apartment, every once in a while revealing himself and holding something under his sweatshirt and yelling, "Come get me. I have a gun. Let's do this!," according to Kelly.

A few minutes later, Coppin jumped out the first-floor window and confronted police officers at the front of the building, says Kelly. When he "ignored multiple directives to show his hands," and reached under his sweatshirt and pulled out an object in the darkness of the evening, officers crouching behind parked cars fired on him.