A Nassau County woman who says her child was shot at Brooklyn's West Indian Day Parade last year has sued the city and its police department on her child's behalf, claiming police failed to properly secure the event before gunfire rang out along the route.
The suit, which was filed in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn last week, alleges the city and NYPD should have expected violence at the event because of shootings and stabbings near the parade route in previous years.
The annual event draws hundreds of thousands of participants and onlookers each year, many of whom don vibrant costumes to celebrate West Indian culture. But violence has sometimes marred the parade and its associated pre-dawn celebration, J'Ouvert.
The NYPD has responded in recent years by deploying large numbers of officers and new technology, including drones to monitor the crowds at the event. Last September, five people were shot in the middle of the day near a central intersection on Eastern Parkway as the parade moved down the thoroughfare.
Despite the shooting, Mayor Eric Adams and police officials defended their response, blaming the mass shooting on a single gunman who disrupted an otherwise peaceful event.
“One person — who we're going to find — that shot five people, you remove him from the equation, you got hundreds of thousands of people that were out this weekend and really heard the call of a peaceful J’Ouvert and a peaceful West Indian Day parade,” Adams said at a press briefing following the incident.
Police have yet to arrest anyone in connection with the shooting.
The suit alleges the city, police and the association that runs the parade failed to “exercise that degree of skill and care and safety generally exercised in and about parades/ festivals/ events.”
The NYPD did not comment on the lawsuit. The city Law Department and the West Indian American Day Carnival Association also did not respond to requests for comment.
Police said that on Sept. 2, a gunman approached a crowd of onlookers at about 2:30 p.m. on Eastern Parkway near Franklin Avenue — about two blocks from the Brooklyn Museum — and opened fire, shooting five people. Denzel Chan, 25, was shot in the stomach and later died of his injuries, according to officials. The four other victims, including two older adults and a 16-year-old, survived.
Plaintiff Gail Mincy said in the lawsuit that her child, who was not identified, “suffered severe pain and received medical, hospital and nursing services” after the shooting. Mincy is seeking unspecified damages on behalf of her child for alleged negligence by the city, the police department and the West Indian American Day Carnival Association.
Her attorney, Joseph Mure IV, declined to comment.
Some people who attended the parade criticized the NYPD's security response after the shooting. They include L. Joy Williams, the Brooklyn NAACP president, who in a podcast interview in September said the city had failed to control masses of people from entering the parade route, which she said created a chaotic situation just prior to the shooting.
“There were people, just general mass people on the parkway walking alongside,” she said.
