Feds reviewing case of mentally ill man shot by cops

July 21, 2016

Lawyers with Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara’s office told the mother of a mentally ill man who was shot dead by cops in his Harlem apartment that they are reviewing her son’s case.

Assistant US Attorney David Kennedy, along with at least half a dozen other civil and criminal prosecutors, met with Hawa Bah and her kids on Thursday to take questions and discuss the 2012 shooting death of her mentally ill son Mohamed Bah.

“He [AUSA Kennedy] assured us that they are looking at this case and they are reviewing a number of documents to determine how they will proceed — if they will proceed,” said Bah’s lawyer Randolph McLaughlin.

McLaughlin said Bah and two of her children pressed prosecutors to bring a case alleging that the NYPD violated Bah’s civil rights when they shot him eight times after his mother called for an ambulance, saying her son had “mental problems.”

“If breaking into someone’s home, shooting them and killing them is not a civil rights violation, when they are on the ground, then nothing is and none of us are safe,” McLaughlin told reporters after his sit down with the government.

A spokeswoman for Bharara declined to comment on the meeting.

The police said they shot Bah because he was lunging at them with the knife. The cops were cleared of criminal wrongdoing by a Manhattan grand jury in 2013.

Bah’s 2013 lawsuit against the NYPD has kept the case open, however, and recently led to the unsealing of documents showing that the NYPD reprimanded one of its officers for breaching protocol leading up to Bah’s death.