The NYPD released body-camera video from Thursday’s ICE shooting in Marble Hill on Friday, and the first thing everybody noticed is what is missing. The footage starts after the shooting.
The clip opens as two NYPD officers pull up to the scene. One spots a man in a bright yellow construction vest carrying a long gun and yells “he’s got a gun.” Bystanders shout “ICE shot him” while 28-year-old Oscar Belgal sits on the ground in handcuffs.
Officers skip the wait for an ambulance, carry Belgal to their SUV and rush him to the hospital, telling him to “put pressure” on his neck wound. Federal officials later said he was hit “superficially” in the neck by a bullet or a bullet fragment.
DHS defended the shooting at a Friday morning news conference. ICE official Marcos Charles said Belgal accelerated into two ICE vehicles and drove toward officers, who fired seven rounds because they believed their lives were in danger.
“There was nothing that was happening that would make people have to disguise themselves as construction workers, surround a man’s car with his 5-year-old son in it, coming from school at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and shoot him in the neck in the car,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said.
Belgal’s lawyers were in a Manhattan courtroom Friday afternoon arguing he was arrested without a valid warrant, and asking a judge to keep him in New York or New Jersey custody. The footage also sparked fresh calls for ICE to release its own body-camera recordings.
See also
- ICE Agent Shoots and Wounds a Man in the Bronx
- Mamdani Called Trump to Try to Get the Wounded Bronx Shooting Suspect Released. Trump Said No.
ICE still has not released its own footage. That is the video everybody is waiting on.