By Jim Fitzgerald
Associated Press
THORNWOOD, NY — State police have joined the investigation into the killing of a 20-year-old college student by officers outside a suburban New York bar.
Mount Pleasant Police Chief Louis Alagno, who previously called the shooting “horrendous,” said at a news conference Monday that the major case unit of the state police and Westchester County crime scene experts have joined the probe.
Danroy Henry of Easton, Mass., was killed early Sunday after police were called to a disturbance at a bar in the hamlet of Thornwood.
Henry’s car was parked in a fire lane outside Finnegan’s Grill. When an officer knocked on the window, the car accelerated and the officer wound up on the hood, police said. The car then hit another officer, and shots were fired. Henry was pronounced dead at the scene. A passenger in his car suffered a minor gunshot wound.
The injured officers were identified Monday as Aaron Hess, of the Pleasantville Police Department, and Ronald Beckley, of the Mount Pleasant town force.
Henry was a junior and varsity defensive football player at the Westchester County campus.
“Not only are we experiencing this great loss, but we’re also beside ourselves because we just absolutely can’t understand how this could happen to our son,” Danroy Henry Sr. told the Brockton Enterprise outside the family’s Massachusetts home.
Henry Sr. and his wife, Angela, had watched their son play in Pace’s homecoming game against Stonehill on Saturday, attended by about 500 people.
“You’re going to get the police reports. So we’re going to need to do some work on our end to make sure that that’s all factual. ... There are a lot of witnesses who say that that’s not the version, so we need to get to the bottom of it, one way or another,” Henry said.
Alagno said Sunday, “It’s something that I would hope would never have happened here, but unfortunately it did, and we’ll proceed with a very, very thorough investigation.”
“I don’t know why they shot him at all,” freshman Kelly Van Wort, 18, told the Journal News.
“Someone told me he hit one of the cops. I don’t think someone deserves to die for that,” Van Wort added.
A campus candlelight vigil in Henry’s memory was held Sunday evening.