Larry-D-Davis

Biography

Larry Davis (May 28, 1966 – February 20, 2008), later known as Adam Abdul-Hakeem, was an American criminal who gained notoriety in November 1986 for his shootout with officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD), in which six officers were shot. Davis, asserting self-defense, was acquitted of all charges aside from illegal gun possession. Davis was later convicted for the 1986 murder of a Bronx drug dealer and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison. Davis died after being stabbed by a fellow inmate in 2008. On November 19, 1986, nine NYPD officers, with nearly twenty outside the building, raided the South Bronx apartment of Davis' sister. Davis escaped the ensuing shootout after a shotgun round creased his scalp, and all six officers who had been shot survived. Police explained the raid as an attempt to question Davis as a multiple-murder suspect, finally obtained an arrest warrant for that and re-explained the raid as an attempt to arrest him. On the seventeenth day of a massive manhunt, Davis was traced to a Bronx apartment block, where he hid in an unknown family's unit. Telephoned by police, he claimed to hold its occupants hostage. After tireless negotiations that lasted the entire night, Davis was eventually convinced that police officers would not shoot him because of all the massive media presence, deciding to surrender peacefully. Davis' legal defense, led by William Kunstler, contended that the raid was a pretense to murder Davis for knowledge of officers' alleged complicity in illicit drug sales and to punish him for abandoning his own drug dealing under their sanction. In March 1988, on jury trial for the killing of four drug dealers—allegedly the pretext for the 1986 raid—Davis was acquitted. Then, in November, as to the nine raiding and six shot officers, Davis' acquittal of aggravated assault and attempted murder triggered widespread outrage. About 1,000 NYPD officers publicly demonstrated against the verdict. Yet for many others,

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