TRENTON, N.J. — A five-hour-long standoff between police in Paterson, New Jersey, and a well-known anti-violence worker in the city — that ended with officers fatally shooting him in his brother’s apartment — began with sobbing pleas from the man’s mother to end the ordeal.
Details released this week by the New Jersey attorney general’s office, including hours of body-camera footage from seven officers as well as seven 911 recordings, provide the most comprehensive account yet of the March 3 standoff that ended with the death of Najee Seabrooks.
Seabrooks, 31, was a crisis intervention worker and mentor with the nonprofit Paterson Healing Collective and died soon after police shot him when he emerged with a knife from the apartment bathroom where he was holed up, according to the attorney general’s office.
“I’m your mother — why you doing this?” Seabrooks’ mother called out in one video. “Najee, stop because I am your mother. Open the door. Open the door, Najee.” Seabrooks’ response is inaudible in the video.
Long accustomed to helping others in the mid-sized city 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of New York, Seabrooks’ co-workers have been shattered by his death and say authorities prevented them from using their mental-health expertise to deescalate the situation.
It’s also led to the state attorney general’s office investigating the shooting, as required under state law, as well as a public outcry for a Justice Department investigation into the city’s police department.
Seabrooks called 911 just before 8 a.m., telling the dispatcher that he needed immediate help because someone was making death threats against him and that he needed an escort to his car. He called dispatchers a half-dozen more times, with the responders telling him that police were already dispatched.
The videos show officers arriving, introducing themselves and offering to get him water. He asks to speak with a sergeant, who soon arrives and asks him to come out of the bathroom. “What’s going on, my love,” the sergeant says when she arrives.
Seabrooks is hard to hear in some of the video, but the sergeant asks, “How do you want to go about hurting yourself?”
“I got a gun on me,” he said.
“You got a gun and two knives?” the sergeant asks.
Tension increased at that point.
Over the next roughly four hours, more police file into the apartment. According to the attorney general’s office, there were crisis negotiators, emergency medical personnel as well…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at ABC News: US…