BRONX MAN RECOUNTS ABUSE BY POLICE IN MISTAKEN RAID

NEW YORK -- Sitting amid shards of glass in his bullet-ridden apartment, a
Bronx man whose home was mistakenly raided by the police accused officers
Tuesday of kicking and beating him and using a racial epithet as they
shouted, "Where are the drugs?"

The police said they could not comment on the allegations because the man,
Ellis Elliott, was preparing to sue the city over Friday's raid, in which
officers mistakenly burst into the apartment looking for a drug dealer.
Deputy Inspector Michael Collins, a spokesman for the Police Department,
would say only, "There is a vigorous investigation ongoing relative to this
matter." Elliott made the accusations at a news conference at his apartment
Tuesday in which his lawyer, Joseph Kelner, produced a picture that he said
was taken after the incident and showed Elliott with a cut on his forehead.
Kelner offered no other evidence of the alleged beating, saying his client
had only just been examined by doctors.

A police investigator who spoke on condition of anonymity said there was no
evidence of injury to Elliott in the police report that was filed in the
case. Elliott, 44, gave his account of the raid Tuesday pointing out the
bullet holes -- 26 in one count -- that lined the front hall of his
ransacked apartment. "I was afraid for my life," Elliott said Tuesday,
intermittently smoking and hyperventilating into a crushed paper bag. "You
could just hear the bullets tearing through stuff. They wanted to make sure
that whatever was here was going to get it."

As Elliott tells it, several men went to his home at 8 a.m. Friday and
began to bang on the metal front door of his fourth-floor apartment as he
slept. Fearful that the men might be robbers, he jumped out of bed naked,
pulled an unlicensed .25-caliber revolver from his night stand and yelled
at the men to move away from the door. When they did not and the door began
to open a crack, Elliot said he fired a single shot from his gun into the
top of it. The police then returned fire. Only after they strafed both
sides of his vestibule, nicked a bureau in the dining room and shot a hole
through a little earring box resting on the living room table did they
stop, he said. Elliott added that the men identified themselves as officers
only at that point and ordered him to approach the door.

After one of his hands was cuffed, he said, the officers used it to drag
him out into the hallway. "They kicked me and beat me and kept asking me,
'Where are the drugs, where are the drugs?' The only way they would address
me was 'nigger,' " he said. "Then they dragged me through there like a
piece of toilet tissue."

The police investigator said one of the nine arresting officers was black,
three were Hispanic and the rest were white.

Elliott, who now faces charges that he illegally possessed a firearm, was
then finally clothed, though only in a woman's blouse and slacks that
officers took from the apartment. They belonged to his girlfriend, Mary
Barnes, who had left earlier in the morning for her job at the post office.
It was unclear why they had not given him his own clothing. Saying they
were the same clothes he wore in jail until his release on Sunday, Elliott
added: "I was lucky I wasn't raped on the way home." According to the
police, narcotics officers receiving information from an undercover
informant misidentified Elliott's apartment at 930 Sheridan Avenue as one
holding drugs and guns.

The police said on Monday that Elliott would be reimbursed for any damages.
The Police Department conducted more than 45,000 such raids last year with
only 10 resulting in the wrong apartment's being stormed, according to
Marilyn Mode, a police spokeswoman. She said the department did not keep
records on how many of those raids actually produced the drugs being sought
or how many resulted in suits against the city, like the one promised by
Elliott.