WOUNDED MAN TRIED TO ESCAPE A VIOLENT PAST, A FRIEND SAYS

It was a critical moment in the deadly sequence of events that
unfolded outside a Queens strip club early Saturday: in a crowd in
front of Club Kalua, Joseph Guzman, according to the police, shouted,
"Yo, get my gun."

An undercover officer working at the club trailed Mr. Guzman and his
friends to their car a couple of blocks away -- giving up his
undercover role and inserting himself into a potential arrest.

The officer, according to the account a colleague said he gave,
confronted the group with his own gun drawn. A moment later, 50 shots
had been fired, killing one of Mr. Guzman's companions, Sean Bell, who
was to be married later that day, and wounding Mr. Guzman and a third
man, Trent Benefield.

Mr. Guzman, it turned out, had no gun in the car. Neither did anyone
else. The officer's fear, if that was what motivated him, was unfounded.

Since the shooting, little has emerged about Mr. Guzman, 31, and Mr.
Benefield, 23, or their version of those events. Mr. Benefield,
according to a law enforcement official, has said he thought Mr. Bell,
23, panicked when he saw the armed officer, mistaking him for a threat
and prompting him to step on the accelerator, setting off the crash
that escalated the confrontation.

But as prosecutors and the police seek to learn the details of what
happened, Mr. Guzman's actions, particularly as the police have
portrayed them, seem destined for serious scrutiny.

Mr. Guzman has had several run-ins with the law in his life, records
show, but his family and friends insisted he later embarked on a
different path.

Mr. Guzman, it turns out, had completed a parole term on Nov. 4, a
year after he was released from Bare Hill Correctional Facility in
Malone, in upstate New York, where he served more than two years for
selling cocaine to an undercover police officer on school grounds in
Queens. He had earlier arrests dating back to 1992 that led to guilty
pleas to disorderly conduct.

Mr. Guzman's most serious crime was committed in 1995, records show.
It was then that he was arrested and sent to state prison for a
gunpoint robbery in Queens, during which he appears to have fired his
weapon at the man he was robbing. He served nearly two years.

Last Saturday, Mr. Guzman himself became a victim. Seated in the
passenger seat of the car driven by Mr. Bell, he was shot at least 11
times by one or more of the five officers who fired their weapons in
the 4 a.m. darkness, wounded from his neck to his feet.

"There is no evidence that they were doing anything wrong," Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg said Monday of Mr. Guzman, Mr. Bell and Mr.
Benefield. "Clearly they were victims."

Mr. Guzman remained in critical condition at Mary Immaculate Hospital
in Jamaica under the fiercely protective watch of his oldest sister,
Yolanda Guzman, 34. On Monday, Ms. Guzman refused to let investigators
from the Police Department's internal affairs division into his
hospital room, certain that they meant harm, according to a family
friend.

Outside the hospital room, Mr. Guzman's family and friends have sought
to paint a softer portrait of him -- as a father, a brother, a
soon-to-be husband..

Charles Aziz Bilal, who said he had known Mr. Guzman for 20 years,
said Mr. Guzman had been trying to turn his life around since his last
stay in prison.

He and other friends say Mr. Guzman's sister has acted as a surrogate
mother to Mr. Guzman ever since their mother, Ruby Mae, and father,
Joseph Anthony, died within a year of each other, she of breast cancer
in August 1992 and he of a stroke in May of the following year, when
Mr. Guzman was 17. A second sister, Ruby Guzman, was traveling from
Virginia yesterday to be at her brother's side.

Two months after his mother died, Mr. Guzman was arrested for assault,
but pleaded to a lesser charge, disorderly conduct. From then on, he
was in and out of jail, and has served a total of 5 years and 7 months
in jails or prisons.

But Mr. Bilal said Mr. Guzman, who worked as a bricklayer, tried to
straighten himself out after his last release from prison in October
2005.

"He became a good role model for his kids," said Mr. Bilal. For all
his run-ins with the law as a teenager and adult, Mr. Bilal said Mr.
Guzman had been a happy-go-lucky child, with an enduring fascination
with cutting hair. During his boyhood in South Jamaica, he routinely
set up his own little barbershop, Mr. Bilal said, and cut the
neighborhood kids' hair free with one of his most treasured
possessions: haircutting clippers.

Mr. Guzman still cuts people's hair, and nurtured a passion for
basketball, too. He grew into a muscular teen and finally a large and
stocky man. He fell in love with a woman named Eboni Browning, now his
fiancee, the mother of his two young sons. Ms. Browning appeared
briefly in front of the hospital on Saturday but burst into tears when
she was asked questions by reporters.

It was not clear how Mr. Guzman and Mr. Bell met. Several of Mr.
Bell's friends said that, unlike Mr. Benefield, they did not know Mr.
Guzman very well. One of Mr. Bell's close friends, Mike Jones, 23,
said he had only seen Mr. Guzman with Mr. Bell once or twice, and only
in recent weeks.

It was also unclear whether Mr. Guzman was to attend Mr. Bell's
wedding, even though he was part of the bachelor party celebration and
was with him until the violent end.