Last Night In Brooklyn ....

A troubled 18-year-old. A furious family argument inside a first-floor Brooklyn apartment. A 911 call. Then, in the darkness, 20 bullets fired by five police officers. The 18-year-old is fatally wounded. The police say he was holding a hairbrush.

The episode unfolded in about 14 minutes in the apartment, an alley next to it and the sidewalk in front of it on Monday evening. The victim, Khiel Coppin, was struck by 10 of the bullets fired by the police and was later pronounced dead at Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center, the authorities said.

Yesterday, the police gave their version of events, going to considerable lengths to defend the five officers who fired the shots — displaying elaborate charts, playing portions of a 911 call from Mr. Coppin’s mother in which he could be heard screaming, “I got a gun,” and showing blowup photographs of Mr. Coppin’s handwritten notes, pulled from his pockets after he died.

According to Kelly's account, police officers arrived at the apartment to find Coppin in the front hallway holding a knife in each hand, while his mother and her 11-year-old daughter stood nearby. He told officers that he was armed with a gun, lunging towards them and saying, "Shoot me, kill me!," says Kelly.

Coppin then moved to a bedroom at the back of the apartment, every once in a while revealing himself and holding something under his sweatshirt and yelling, "Come get me. I have a gun. Let's do this!," according to Kelly.

A few minutes later, Coppin jumped out the first-floor window and confronted police officers at the front of the building, says Kelly. When he "ignored multiple directives to show his hands," and reached under his sweatshirt and pulled out an object in the darkness of the evening, officers crouching behind parked cars fired on him.

Coppin was hit in the torso and lower leg eight times by two Hispanic and three white officers who fired 20 shots. Under his lifeless body, officers found the hairbrush he had been wielding.

Kelly called the shooting a "terrible tragedy," adding that his condolences went out to Coppin's mother and family.

The press conference was the NYPD's first decisive move to distinguish this incident from previous, controversial New York police shootings that divided the city and brought a firestorm of criticism from a number of different directions, most of which characterized city cops as trigger-happy and motivated by race.

In November 2006, an unarmed man named Sean Bell was killed after police fired 50 bullets at his car on what turned out to be his wedding day. In 1999, an unarmed African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed when police fired 41 shots at him. Diallo had been pulling a wallet, not a gun, out of his poc