POLICE SHOOTING VICTIM IS REMEMBERED AND MOURNED IN TEARS AND SONG

More than a thousand mourners filled a funeral home in Brooklyn and the
streets outside last night to pay respects to Patrick Dorismond, the
26-year-old security guard killed by a plainclothes police officer last week.

Dozens carried or wore the Haitian flag, and Mr. Dorismond's cousins, who
are renowned Haitian musicians, sang for him.

Across Flatbush Avenue, the protesters carried pickets denouncing the
police. Mr. Dorismond was the fourth unarmed black man to be killed by the
police in the last 13 months.

Inside the Andrew Torregrossa Funeral Home in Marine Park, Mr. Dorismond
lay in a coffin lined with white satin, beneath an arch bearing his name in
white and green carnations.

Several women, overcome with grief, let out hoarse, muffled cries and had
to be escorted out.

Johnny Dorismond, the victim's older brother, said his brother had gone to
a better place, beyond the torment faced by the officer who killed him.

"If he has a guilty conscience, that's his torture for life," Mr. Dorismond
said.

Patrick Dorismond was shot on March 16 after a plainclothes officer
approached him outside a bar on Eighth Avenue in Midtown and asked if he
knew where to buy marijuana. Mr. Dorismond reacted angrily, and in the
ensuing scuffle, one of the officer's backups, Detective Anthony Vasquez,
shot him in the chest.

Detective Vasquez has said, through his lawyer, that the shooting was
accidental.

The wake last night was attended by Haiti's consul general to the United
States, Therese Guitos, and by Alan G. Hevesi, the city comptroller.

"The overwhelming majority of New Yorkers who are decent, caring people
offer their most profound sympathy and understanding for your loss," Mr.
Hevesi told the Dorismond family.

"This is an awful, awful day."

Outside the funeral home, peaceful protesters, surrounded by dozens of
police officers in powder-blue windbreakers, chanted and carried signs,
mostly in Haitian Creole, denouncing Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Some of the signs compared the mayor to a "loup garou," a Haitian demon who
preys on the blood of babies.

The death of Mr. Dorismond has inflamed political and racial tensions in
the city, not just because of the shooting itself, but, critics say,
because of the way the Giuliani administration has handled its aftermath.

Shortly after the shooting, Mayor Giuliani and the police commissioner,
Howard Safir, revealed Mr. Dorismond's police record, including a sealed
court record of an incident when he was 13. They did not immediately
release Detective Vasquez's disciplinary record -- which included his
shooting of a neighbor's Rottweiler and pulling a gun in a 1997 bar fight.

Critics, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Giuliani's opponent in the
race for the United States Senate in New York, accused city officials of
blaming Mr. Dorismond for his own death. But the mayor said that he was
merely pointing out that Mr. Dorismond had acted violently in the past and
may have acted violently in the moments that led to the shooting.

Mr. Dorismond, who had two children, was a security guard for the 34th
Street Partnership. He was never convicted of a crime as an adult. His
arrests for punching a man in an argument over drugs, in 1993, and for
pulling a gun during a traffic dispute in 1996, resulted in disorderly
conduct violations, for which he performed community service. He served no
jail time. The case against him in 1987, when he was 13, was dropped.

His death was a bitter blow to Haitian Americans, still reeling from the
brutalization by the police of Abner Louima, who was sexually assaulted
with a stick in a Brooklyn precinct station house in 1997 after being
arrested in a case of mistaken identity.

The Rev. Al Sharpton arrived later in the evening and entered the funeral
home with his arm around Mr. Louima. Mr Sharpton gave a brief prayer and
Mr. Louima spoke to the mourners, saying there must not be a repeat of
these incidents. After Mr. Sharpton left, a crowd of demonstartors spilled
into Flatbush Avenue.

Mr. Dorismond's death came shortly after the verdict on Feb. 25 in the
Amadou Diallo case, where four plainclothes police officers were cleared of
criminal charges after firing 41 shots at Mr. Diallo, an unarmed Guinean
street peddler, hitting him 19 times.

Five days after that verdict, Malcolm Ferguson, 23, also unarmed, was
killed by plainclothes officers in the Bronx, three blocks from where Mr.
Diallo was shot. The other unarmed man killed by the police recently was
Richard Watson, who was shot in the back last September. All of the
shooting victims were black.

At Mr. Dorismond's wake, Delroy LaRoc, a friend of Mr. Dorismond's since
1989, when they attended Bishop Loughlin High School together, remembered
making music with him.

"He would be the beat and I would be the lyrics," he said.

Mr. Dorismond's death left one mourner, Felix Serieux, 12, of East New
York, afraid and perplexed.

"It's just sad," said Felix, a seventh grader at Bildersee Intermediate
School. "It makes me afraid for my own life, you understand.

'Say no to drugs.' They tell you that in school, to say no.

So what happens now? Do you have to say yes?"