By Michael Wilson, The New York Times
 Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times NYPD Detective Richard Burt fatally shot the gunman who killed Councilman James E. Davis in Council chambers on July 23, 2003. |
The first time Richard Burt fired a pistol in his life was 10 years ago - as a 25-year-old campus security guard who had just passed the Police Department’s exam, standing awkwardly at the city firing range in the Bronx.
“I was bad,” he said. “I hit, like, dirt. Clean target.”
Friday marked one year since the first time he fired his weapon on the job, with a lethal accuracy that startled even him, ending what could have become a blood bath in the heart of city government.
On July 23, 2003, a fringe political rival of City Councilman James E. Davis shot him to death in the crowded balcony of the Council chambers. Officer Burt was on his second or third week as the security detail for Speaker Gifford Miller, and was on the chamber floor one story below. He looked up, drew his Glock and fired six rounds, striking the gunman, Othniel Boaz Askew, four times, dropping him dead.
The shooting of Councilman Davis brought grief and panic to City Hall and questions over how an armed man was able to get through the metal detectors out front - a panic that subsided when it became clear that the killer had been whisked inside as a personal guest of his victim.
For Officer Burt, 35, a droll and imperturbable product of Manhattan Catholic schools, the shooting brought the sort of brief lift out of obscurity that nudges guys like him from time to time. You wake up one morning, put in your contact lenses and react to a surprise the way you have been trained to react, without even really thinking about it, and suddenly the papers are slapping the word “hero” under that bad picture from your police identification card.
“People walk up and say, ‘Thank you,’ ” the officer, now a detective, said last week. “You don’t get too many thank-you’s in police work. I appreciate thank-you’s. People come up and say, ‘My daughter was in the room,’ ‘My wife.’ That really hits home.”
As Detective Burt’s mother said the day after the shooting, he had never talked about being a police officer as a boy. That did not happen until he dropped out of college after one year and, after leaving a job as a parking lot cashier, was working as a night watchman at the Fashion Institute of Technology. His supervisor, a former police officer, told him he should take the police exam, and with the casual shrug behind most of his career decisions, he thought, why not? He was sworn in in February 1994.
Detective Burt passed the academy easily enough and picked his sidearm with a sort of Goldilocks methodology: “They had the Smith & Wesson, which I found too heavy and big, the Sig Sauer, which I never heard of, and the Glock. So I chose the Glock.”
His wife, Yvette, was not thrilled with the gun in their little apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which they shared with their young son and daughter, or with his new career. He put the Glock away at night in a lockbox.
He was a rookie working near the neighborhood where he was raised, the Upper West Side. “You think you know everything and you’re ready,” he said. “Then there’s an E.D.P. or something, or a D.O.A., it’s like, oh man,” he said, using police shorthand for emotionally disturbed people or for crime victims who are dead when they get to the hospital. And perhaps the toughest, most aggravating detail: “Parades.”
One rainy day, after a few years of this, Officer Burt was working near Gracie Mansion when he spotted another officer, inside a guard booth out back.
“It looked comfortable,” he said. It was his first exposure to the department’s Intelligence Division, which, among other things, protects certain city officials and buildings. “Was I burned out? I don’t think I was burned out,” he said. All the same, “I’d done a lot of running around. They’re just behind Gracie Mansion - dry. I’d had enough of the street.”
The transfer came through in 1998 and he went to City Hall. Security there was tightened after Sept. 11, and he became a fixture at one of the booths in front, greeting council members and their staff members, redirecting would-be brides and grooms to the Municipal Building across the street.
A few years passed, and another position caught his eye, as a bodyguard with the Council speaker. There was a part-time opening while one of the regular officers was on vacation. Officer Burt attended dignitary protection classes, learned a new vocabulary (“the principal,” “the body”) and put on a suit for work for the first time.
His first Council meeting was July 23. It was common practice for the officers at the metal detectors to wave the members past, allowing them to bypass the machines. Sometimes, they waved their guests past as well. The gunman, Mr. Askew, arrived that day at City Hall as a guest of Mr. Davis’s. Detective Burt said he believed Mr. Askew knew he would be waved past the detector. Mr. Askew sneaked in a silver .40-caliber pistol and extra rounds stuffed in his socks.
Officer Burt had worked double shifts the two previous days, and was tired. He said he was focused on keeping an eye on Speaker Miller when the first shots echoed upstairs. (He declined to describe his actions in detail because of a pending civil case brought against the city by Mr. Davis’s mother, Thelma Davis, who blames the authorities for allowing an armed man to enter City Hall.)
In the moments after the shooting, “there was a lot of confusion,” Officer Burt said. For many minutes after, people in and outside of City Hall believed the gunman had escaped and was hiding somewhere in the building or had ducked into a nearby subway station. Even Officer Burt was unsure. “It crossed my mind, there’s someone else,” he said. He said he did not know whether he had hit anyone at first. “I couldn’t tell, because of the distance,” he said.
Adding to the general confusion, Officer Burt quickly left the chambers with his “principal,” Speaker Miller, rushing him to his office (finding the doors locked, with staff members hiding inside), then out of City Hall, all the while oblivious that he had just killed the gunman. He told the speaker about firing his gun only when they stopped at the nearby Tweed Courthouse. He next told his sergeant, and as is procedure, handed over his Glock.
They all tried to figure out what had happened. Besides the police officers in the room, it was known that Mr. Davis, a former police officer, carried a gun. But who else could have been armed?
Officer Burt was sent to the hospital for the standard post-shooting trauma evaluation and psychological testing. The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, came and asked if he was all right, and the officer finally got the news of what had happened, that he had killed the man.
He arrived home late that night to find reporters on his lawn in St. Albans, Queens. He told them he was tired and went inside to his wife and three children. “She was just shaking her head. She couldn’t believe it,” he said. “The kids were watching the news all night.”
The next morning, he rather brazenly turned down a request from department brass to appear on news programs beside the police commissioner. He said he was too tired. He was apparently forgiven this slight, and ordered to appear later that morning at City Hall’s ceremonial Blue Room, where, before dozens of reporters, secretaries, paralegals, Mr. Kelly, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, his wife and their children, he was promoted to detective. “He was able to hit the assassin from such a distance in the midst of so much confusion,” the mayor said. “We should all be very grateful.”
He remembers thinking about what to say just before he walked into the room: “All this applause, it’s great, but we don’t have James. We lost James. I’ve got to say something to the Davis family, at least.” And that is what he said, right away.
His telephone rang for days. Old friends from Cardinal Hayes High School, cops he used to work with, the parent of a child on his son’s baseball team.
“Nice shot,” they would say.
“Thank you,” he would reply.
He seemed to be suddenly upstaging his “principal,” a ticklish thing for a politician’s bodyguard. “I would go places with the speaker and they would recognize me. They’d walk right by the speaker to come to me,” he said.
But it wasn’t long before he became the speaker’s permanent security detail.
Yesterday, the mayor, the speaker, city leaders and members of Mr. Davis’s family met for a ceremony to rename a room in City Hall after Mr. Davis. There were several speeches, and the mayor praised “Richard Burt’s quick and heroic actions,” but for the most part, the detective stood unnoticed between two taller men, his back against a bookshelf.