For hours, the Paterson police pleaded with Najee Seabrooks to come out of a locked bathroom where he was threatening to kill himself. “Everybody’s walking out of here, including you,” one of the officers told him, according to video from police body cameras released by the New Jersey attorney general’s office this week. “I’m dying in this bathroom,” said Seabrooks, a 31-year-old mentor at an anti-violence organization in Paterson, a city of 158,000 people in northern New Jersey. Sign up for The
A protest march the week after Najee Seabrooks was shot and killed by police officers, in Paterson, N.J., March 10, 2023.
But at 12:51 p.m. on March 3, about five hours after someone called 911 to report a man in distress, Seabrooks was declared dead. He had been shot by two officers, who fired at him after Seabrooks came out of the bathroom and “lunged toward the officers with a knife in his hand,” according to a statement by the attorney general’s office, which is investigating the shooting.
The officers “were there to render aid and as you’ll see in the videos, they were trying as much as possible to avoid a tragic outcome,” he said. Members of the Paterson Healing Collective said that they were barred by the police from intervening as they waited for hours in the lobby of the multistory apartment building where Seabrooks was shot.
Chowdhury, who was a probation officer for 10 years, said showing a gun to someone going through a mental health crisis only increases paranoia and fear.
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