Bronx woman was calm moments before cop pulled trigger: EMT
An EMT revealed a poignant detail Friday in the police shooting death of emotionally disturbed Bronx woman Deborah Danner — testifying that he’d been about to move her to safety moments before shots rang out.
Danner had calmed down and was seated on her bed as EMT Patrick Moore left the bedroom to get a chair in which to transport her out of her castle Hill apartment, he testified.
Suddenly, a half-dozen cops rushed past him into the bedroom, he testified.
“I heard a lot of commotion,” Moore said. “I heard yelling, ‘Get down!’ I heard the word ‘bat,’ he added.
Defendant Sgt. Hugh Barry has contended through his lawyer that he shot the schizophrenic Danner, 66, as she swung a bat at him.
“Then I heard gunshots,” Moore said.
He heard Danner let out one scream, he said.
Inside the bedroom, the dying woman was “Lying on the bed … unconscious,” he said.
“There was blood spewing out of her left chest and her left arm was mangled,” he said.
“The patient was taking her last agonal respirations,” he said, using the medical terms for her deep, dying breaths.
There was no pulse, he said — and instead of the chair he’d intended to transport her in, Moore and his fellow EMTs carried the near-dead woman from the apartment in a stretcher.
Prosecution testimony is slated to continue Monday before Bronx Supreme Court Justice Robert Neary, who is presiding over the non-jury trial.
Barry faces up to life in prison if convicted of murder.