One Man Shot 6 NYPD Officers — A Bronx Jury Let Him Walk: Larry Davis HT

 

 

 

November 19th, 1986. The height of the crack epidemic in New York City. A cold winter night in the South Bronx. 27 armed police officers from the 41st Precinct and the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit have assembled outside a six-story apartment building on Fulton Avenue in the Morrisania section of the Bronx. They’re wearing bulletproof vests.

They’re carrying shotguns and handguns. And they’re about to raid the apartment of Larry Davis’s sister, Regina Lewis. What happens next will become one of the wildest shootouts in New York City history. Nine officers storm through the door with their weapons drawn. Inside the small apartment are Davis, his girlfriend, his sister, and young children, including two infants.

According to Davis and later trial testimony, a shotgun round grazes his scalp before he even has a chance to react. He grabs a .45 caliber pistol and begins firing back. In the chaos and darkness of that bedroom, Larry Davis shoots six police officers. The apartment is left bloodied and littered with spent cartridges.

Officers are running for their lives. Two are wounded seriously enough to require emergency surgery. But here’s where the story gets insane. Larry Davis escapes. He slips through an adjoining apartment belonging to another sister and vanishes through a window >>  >> into the cold Bronx night. And despite 27 cops surrounding the building, despite officers stationed at every possible exit, a 20-year-old kid from the South Bronx just disappeared.

The police had no idea where he went. But they were about to spend the next 17 days hunting him down. Now, before we continue with the manhunt and the trial that would shock New York City, we’d like to mention that we post weekly content on our main page and our offshoot channels. If you enjoy true crime and gang content like this, hit subscribe and check the links in the description for more.

We’ve also got a buy me a coffee link if you want to support what we do here. Now, back to the story of Larry Davis. To understand how Larry Davis ended up in that apartment with a gun in his hand, you need to understand where he came from and what the Bronx looked like in the 1980s. Larry Davis was born on May the 28th, 1966 in Newberry, South Carolina.

His family moved to the Bronx when he was young, settling on Woody Crest Avenue, not far from Yankee Stadium. He was somewhere between 12 and 18 siblings. His father, Larry Davis Sr., walked out on the family when Davis was just 10 years old. Despite the chaos of his upbringing, Davis had talent. He played multiple instruments and dreamed of making it big in the hip-hop industry.

 He ran small recording studios in both the Bronx and Manhattan. He was skilled at repairing and modifying motorcycles. By all accounts from people who knew him, Larry Davis was entrepreneurial and musically gifted. But the Bronx in the 1980s didn’t offer many legitimate paths to success for young black men. Crack cocaine was flooding the streets.

Money was everywhere if you were willing to take the risk. And according to Davis and his defense team, at just 15 years old, Larry Davis was recruited into the drug trade by corrupt NYPD officers. The story goes like this. In 1981, Davis was caught riding a motorcycle without a license in his neighborhood. According to Davis, instead of issuing a summons, the officer who stopped him offered him something else entirely.

 A chance to sell and transport cocaine that would be turned into crack. Davis claims he discussed the deal with his friend Rick Burgos a few days later, and the two of them got into business. Now, the officer in question has always denied these allegations. He told reporters years later that Larry was blaming everybody under the sun and that he gets to sleep at night.

But what’s undeniable is that Davis’s criminal record began in 1983 and included a 1984 robbery conviction and subsequent probation violation. By 1986, he was deep in the streets. Here’s where things get murky. Davis and his supporters claim that he stopped dealing drugs in late 1986 after the woman carrying his first child suffered a miscarriage.

 Davis blamed her crack cocaine use for the loss. His sister also suffered from addiction. Seeing the destruction firsthand, Davis allegedly wanted  out. But when you’re selling drugs for corrupt cops, getting out isn’t as simple as walking away. According to the defense’s version of events, Davis was withholding drug proceeds, reportedly around $40,000.

And the same officers who had recruited him were now hassling him and his family. Making threats, telling him they wanted him dead. The Bronx District Attorney’s office told a different story. They alleged that Davis was part of a small, loosely organized, very violent group of gunmen who had been robbing, assaulting, and killing drug dealers across the Bronx and northern Manhattan.

They connected him to a string of murders in 1986, including the shooting death of Raymond Viscano in August, Victor La Grumba in September, and four drug dealers in October. The prosecution’s theory was simple. Larry Davis was a crack dealer who specialized in armed robbery of rival crack dealers.

 And on October the 30th, 1986, things went sideways when a street-level dealer named Roy Gray spotted Davis about to rob some cocaine dealers in Harlem. Gray Vakiyi alerted the NYPD and police chased Davis and two other men in a stolen car from Washington Heights all the way to the Bronx. Davis and his accomplices bailed out and scaled a staircase, firing shots at the pursuing officers before vanishing into an apartment building.

20 days later, the police came for him at his sister’s apartment on Fulton Avenue. But here’s the thing that would become central to the entire case. No arrest warrant had been issued until  after the shootout. The police claimed they were just there to question Davis  about the murders.

 Davis claimed they were there to kill that apartment, Larry Davis put rounds  into six officers and escaped into the night. The manhunt that followed was one of the largest in New York City history. Hundreds of officers searched the Bronx for 17 days while Davis slipped in and out of safe houses with the help of family and friends.

On December 5th, 1986, police received a tip that Davis had been seen entering  the Twin Parks West Housing Project on 183rd Street in the Fordham section of the Bronx, where another sister lived. They surrounded the 14-story building, closed off local streets, and posted sharpshooters on nearby rooftops.

Officers began a systematic search of all 312 units. At some point during that day, Larry Davis forced his way at gunpoint into apartment 14E, where Elroy and Sophia Suarez lived with their two daughters. He held the family hostage as negotiations stretched through the night. For more than 6 hours, Davis talked with police over the phone and through the apartment door.

He eventually became convinced of something critical. With all the media presence outside, with cameras rolling and reporters watching, the police would not shoot him. They couldn’t shoot him. Not with the whole world watching. At 7:30 in the morning on December the 6th, Larry Davis surrendered peacefully. As a ring of cops led him down the building’s wheelchair ramp, something unexpected happened.

The crowd that had gathered didn’t boo. They didn’t curse. They chanted his name. Larry. Larry. Larry. By the time he was brought out in handcuffs, >>  >> Larry Davis had become a legend in the South Bronx. And he was about to become something even bigger. A symbol. If you’re finding this story as wild as we did when we first researched it, >>  >> make sure you’re subscribed to the channel.

We cover cases like this every week. And there’s a lot more to this story coming up. Now, let’s talk about the trials. Larry Davis faced a mountain of charges. The Bronx County District Attorney, along with District Attorneys in Manhattan and Long Island, threw everything at him. Weapons possession, murder of drug dealers, attempted murder of police officers, kidnapping, auto theft.

 He was looking at spending the rest of his life behind bars. His defense was handled by two of the most controversial lawyers in America, William Kunstler and Lynne Stewart. Both were long-time radical defense attorneys and activists. Kunstler once said to reporters that any black guy that shoots six cops and puts the fear of God in police officers, he thought was great.

Their strategy was audacious. They argued that Larry Davis was not a cold-blooded killer. He was a victim. A young man who had been recruited into drug dealing by corrupt police officers at 15 years old. A man who knew too much about NYPD involvement in the crack trade. And a man who the police wanted dead. The raid on his sister’s apartment, they claimed, was not a legitimate law enforcement operation.

It was a murder attempt. >>  >> A death squad sent to silence Larry Davis before he could expose the dirty cops who had made him. At trial, Kunstler and Stewart put on a show. They called the prosecution’s evidence fabricated. They painted the four murdered drug dealers as unsympathetic victims. They highlighted the chaos of the crack epidemic and the well-documented corruption within the NYPD.

Mary Davis, Larry’s 65-year-old mother, testified that on October the 31st, 1986, the day after her son allegedly killed four suspected crack dealers, she was visited by four police officers. The implication was clear. The cops were already watching. Already planning. The prosecution had a solid case. Over 50 witnesses, ballistic evidence, fingerprints on a cash box placing Davis at the crime scene.

But Kunstler and Stewart >>  >> weren’t fighting the evidence. They were fighting the system. On March the 3rd, 1988, after 9 days of deliberation, the longest in Bronx County history for a single defendant, the jury delivered its verdict. Not guilty. Larry Davis walked on the murder charges. But the trials weren’t over.

 He still had to face the shooting of the six police officers. The first attempt at a trial was declared a mistrial because of biased jury selection. The second was also declared a mistrial after a white juror expressed concern about police harassment if he voted to acquit. The third time >>  >> was different. On November the 20th, 1988, after deliberating 38 hours over 5 days, a jury of 10 black and two Hispanic members acquitted Larry Davis of attempted murder and aggravated assault.

They found him guilty only of criminal possession of a weapon. When interviewed afterward, the jury forewoman said Davis was a young and innocent kid who got recruited by a few corrupt policemen. They came in to wipe him out. They wanted him dead so he couldn’t squeal on them. She said the jury believed the defense’s assertion that the police fired first and that Davis was defending himself.

Detective McKern, the officer most seriously wounded in the shootout and later forced into retirement by his injuries, called it a racist verdict. He said that the day this happened, a bunch of good, honest police officers went to lock up Larry Davis because he had killed people and not for anything else. Defense attorney Lynne Stewart had a different take.

She later quipped that the black community was no longer going to have black Sambos. They’re going to have black Rambos. The reaction was explosive. Over 1,500 NYPD officers demonstrated outside the courthouse after the verdict was announced. Mayor Edward Koch said he was shocked. Legal pundits complained that Bronx juries had become so distrustful of police that they would disregard reason itself.

But here’s the thing. The distrust wasn’t without cause. Just before Davis went on trial, a jury had acquitted a white police officer of manslaughter in the death of Eleanor Bumpurs, a 67-year-old black woman who was shot to death when she resisted attempts to evict her from her Bronx apartment in 1984. There was the police killing of Michael Stewart, the rage over the Howard Beach incident, the Tompkins Square Park riot.

As Lynne Stewart later reflected, there was a sense in the black community that the police were just running wild and shooting to kill. And years later, the Mollen Commission would expose widespread criminality in the NYPD, including drug dealing and violence by officers. Maybe Larry Davis wasn’t lying about everything after all.

Davis was sentenced to 5 to 15 years on the weapons charges. But he still had more trials ahead. In December 1989, he was acquitted of the September 1986 murder of Harlem drug dealer Victor La Grumba. Witnesses placed him in Florida at the time of the killing. But in March 1991, Larry Davis’s luck finally [snorts] ran out.

He was convicted for the August 1986 murder of Raymond Vizcaino, a Bronx drug dealer. Prosecutors argued that Davis and his brother Eddie attempted a robbery that led to Vizcaino being shot to death through an apartment door on Webster Avenue. Already serving his weapons sentence, Davis was now sentenced to an additional 25 years to life.

When the judge handed down the sentence, Davis looked him in the eye and said, “I ain’t afraid of you.” While incarcerated, Larry Davis converted to Islam and changed his name to Adam Abdul Hakim. He continued to maintain his innocence, asserting that police corruption was responsible for all his legal troubles.

He once told Stanley Cohen, one of the first  Bronx Legal Aid lawyers to take his case, that he knew the only way he would ever come out of prison was in a body bag. You don’t shoot as many cops as I  did, beat them at trial, and ever go home a free man. He was right. On February the 20th, 2008, Larry Davis was in the recreation area of Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, New York.

A fellow inmate named Luis Rosado approached him with a homemade shank. Rosado  stabbed Davis repeatedly in the head, chest, arms, back, and legs. Davis was 41 years old. Former Bronx prosecutor William B. Flack, who had lost the police shooting  case against Davis, years earlier, told reporters he was not  surprised to hear how Davis had died.

 “He lived a violent life, and he died a violent life. My understanding is that Mr. Davis did not make a lot of friends while he was incarcerated.” Former Mayor Edward Koch, the man who had publicly  condemned Davis’ acquittals decades earlier, was quoted saying “The prison system did what the criminal justice system could not.” Larry Davis remains one of the most divisive figures in New York City history.

To some, he was a violent drug dealer who killed people and got away with shooting cops because of a biased jury. To others, he was a symbol of resistance against police brutality and corruption, a young black man who fought back against the system designed to destroy him. His lawyer, Lynne Stewart, who would later be arrested herself on charges of helping an imprisoned terrorist communicate with his followers, acknowledged that her client was not warm and fuzzy.

 “He had very little charm,” she said. “But he was what he was, and full marks have to be given to someone who is willing to stand up when he is under fire.” Whether Larry Davis was a cold-blooded killer or a victim of corrupt police officers may never be definitively answered. But his story continues to provoke divided reactions nearly  four decades later.

And in a city where the relationship between police and communities of color remains fraught, the questions his case raised about justice, corruption, and who gets to defend themselves are as relevant today as they were on that cold November night in 1986. That’s the story of Larry Davis, the only man in American history to be acquitted of shooting police officers.

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