Agent Mistakes Candy Bar For Gun and Shoots Youth

By David Kocieniewski

NEW YORK (AP) An undercover federal agent shot a 17yearold highschool
soccer player in the leg after apparently mistaking the candy bar in his
hand for a gun, published reports said today.

The student, Andre Burgess, was walking down 138th Street in Laurelton,
Queens at about 7 p.m. Thursday when he passed a car full of undercover law
enforcement officers who were hunting for a drug dealer suspected of
killing a Customs agent.

One of the marshals apparently mistook the silver wrapper of the Three
Musketeers bar in Burgess' hand for a pistol.

``U.S. marshal! Drop the gun!'' he yelled, jumping out of the car and
pulling his gun, unidentified law enforcement officials told The New York
Times. He reportedly shot Burgess once in the thigh.

``He didn't even give me a chance to react,'' Burgess told the Times. ``I
turned to see what was up, and boom, I'm hit, and I fell to the ground.''

The teenager, the goaltender and captain on the Hillcrest High School
soccer team, was in stable condition at Jamaica Hospital on Friday. Doctors
said they expected him to be hospitalized for a week, and then make a full
recovery.

The marshal, identified by the Daily News as William Cannon, was working as
part of the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force, a multiagency
group, said Lawrence Parker, chief deputy of the United States Marshal's
Eastern District office in Brooklyn.

Parker told the Daily News Burgess had not been a target of the task
force's investigation, and declined to comment further on the incident.

The Queens district attorney's office was investigating. Federal officials
planned to conduct a probe to determine whether Cannon violated any weapons
guidelines. Federal agents are only allowed to fire if they are in a
lifethreatening situation, officials said.

Burgess, who lives in Springfield Gardens, Queens, complained that the
marshal who shot him did not even apologize, and said he had been
handcuffed on the ground for 10 minutes.

``I'm laying there, bleeding, waiting to go the hospital, and he's shaking
hands with the other cops, or agents, or whatever they were,'' he said.
``He asked one of them, `Don't I know you from some other case?' And I'm
still lying there.''

Burgess scoffed when asked whether there was a racial element to the
shooting. The Marshal who fired the shot is white; Burgess is black, and
like many young men his age, he said he now fears the police.

"It's sick," he said. "You can't even walk down the street and eat a candy
bar anymore."