By Michael Brick, The New York Times
On the Louis Armstrong Houses in Brooklyn, where a police officer shot and killed a teenager early Saturday morning, lives are jumbled together. Extended families share apartments, nicknames are familiar and people traverse smoothly from one building to the next and back again by way of the rooftop.
That is not how life is where the officer who fired the fatal shot, Richard S. Neri Jr., calls home.
Officer Neri, who was placed on modified duty and forced to turn in his gun and badge, lives in Wantagh, on the South Shore of Long Island, about 27 miles from the housing project he patrolled in Brooklyn.
With his wife, Felicia, Officer Neri owns a 43-year-old ranch house with cream-colored aluminum siding, a few shrubs and a white plastic fence. That part of Wantagh, where the median household income is about $72,000, is built around keeping people separated. Obstacles to an easy flow of neighborly life are evident: few of the sidewalks are shoveled.
The house is on a four-lane thoroughfare, where the patches of homes seem to divide strip malls rather than the other way around. The stamp of the suburbs is evident in a jogging path that gives runners a view of little more than roadway for miles.
A knock on Officer Neri’s door was not answered yesterday, though people were seen going into the house, which has a little porch with an iron railing, chipped white paint, a snow-covered lawn and, yesterday, drawn blinds.
Stuart London, a lawyer for Officer Neri, described his client as a “model professional officer.”
“He has not had the opportunity to speak to the district attorney’s office as of yet and hopes that the case will not be judged until it’s been fully investigated and he has had an opportunity to relate the events as they appeared to him on the night in question,” Mr. London said.
This month, Officer Neri turned 35, the exact average age for his neighborhood in the 2000 census. In his nearly 12 years on the police force, according to law enforcement officials, Officer Neri had not fired a shot or been the subject of any disciplinary procedures. He works for the housing bureau, which was merged into the Police Department in 1995.
The attention paid yesterday to Officer Neri, manifested in a small throng of reporters and photographers gathered outside the house, was a complete change for a man who had up to now attracted little attention, so little that several of Officer Neri’s neighbors said they did not know him by name.
Steve Petrucci, 44, who lives across the street, said that he did not previously know what Officer Neri did for a living. “I know cops can be really hotheaded,” Mr. Petrucci said. “He didn’t seem like that. Hearing the story and picturing him, it has to be some kind of freaky accident. We’re just hoping the guy gets a fair shake.”
Stacy Albin contributed reporting for this article.