DIALLO, AMADOU (2 September 1975–4 February 1999), Guinean immigrant killed by New York Police Department (NYPD) officers in an alleged case of mistaken identity.
Diallo was born in Sinoe, Liberia, to Saikou and Amadou Diallo. The eldest of four children, he grew up in a relatively prosperous environment, attending private schools in Togo and Thailand, among other places, and studied English and computer science. His parents, who ran a business exporting gemstones from Africa to Asia, divorced in 1989 when he was seventeen. He lived with his mother for a time in Bangkok before returning to Guinea to ask the blessing of family elders to go to New York City and build a life of his own. Arriving in New York in 1997, Diallo rented a small apartment in the Bronx and worked first as a bicycle messenger and then as a street peddler selling gloves, socks, and videos, trying to save money to go to college.
In the early-morning hours of February 4, 1999, as part of the now-defunct New York City Street Crime Unit, four plainclothes NYPD officers were patrolling Diallo’s Bronx neighborhood, allegedly looking for a serial rapist. The officers stopped by an unidentified car on Wheeler Avenue that belonged to Diallo, who was outside, standing in front of his apartment building. When the officers ordered him to show his hands, Diallo ran up the stairs into his building and reached into his jacket pocket to show his wallet. The four officers drew their semiautomatic pistols and fired forty-one shots at him, nineteen of which struck Diallo, fatally wounding him.
Sherrie Elliot, an eyewitness, stated that the police continued to shoot Diallo even as he lay on the ground. In the subsequent investigation, no weapons were found on or near Diallo. The internal NYPD investigation ruled that the four officers acted within departmental guidelines, but on March 25 a Bronx grand jury indicted the four officers on second-degree-murder and reckless-endangerment charges. At the last minute the criminal trial of the four officers was moved upstate to Albany, New York, on the grounds that the intense publicity the case had generated had made it impossible to select an unbiased jury.
In February 2000 in Albany, after three days of deliberation, the jury, composed of four Black and eight White jurors, acquitted the officers of all charges.