ANGRY NEIGHBORHOOD WANTS ANSWERS

Angry residents, still upset over January's police shooting of a seemingly
deranged man in their neighborhood, surrounded the Rev. Terry Lee as he
tried to wash away the blood from yesterday's fatal shooting of a drug
suspect in East Flatbush.

Lee, who was being assisted in the cleanup effort by Richard Green, head of
the Crown Heights Youth Collective, stopped his work when someone in the
crowd shouted:

"Don't hide it by doing that. It's not going away. It's a reminder. That
could be you."

Moments later, a fire truck came by to hose away the blood, but Lee waved
the firefighters away, saying to return when things had calmed down.

"We're not doing this to cover up the crime scene," Lee, pastor of the
Byways and Hedges Youth for Christ Ministries and a clergy liaison for the
Police Department, told the crowd. "We don't want you to get the wrong
impression. I was hoping that by washing the blood it would clean up the
scene."

Yesterday's shooting at the intersection of New York and Foster avenues was
around the corner from where George Louisgene, 23, was shot six times on
Jan. 16 by two police officers who said he had charged them with a carving
knife and a 2-foot-long rod with a 3-inch hook on one end.

That shooting, in a courtyard at the Vandermeer Estates housing project,
was later declared justified by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

But angry neighbors pointed to the earlier shooting yesterday as they
gathered to sound off against police. The festering scene also attracted a
number of community leaders who tried to cool things down.

"There's a lot of anger," said Carol Bagot, a community liaison for state
Sen. John Sampson (D-Brooklyn). "It's their community, and they're feeling
no one is listening. And they need to air their feelings."

Bagot said tensions were running high because residents were having a
difficult time getting specific information on the latest incident. "I'm
telling them in order to really have a perspective on what happened they
should really calm down," she said.

One resident, Cynthia Milton, 39, said she was grappling with how she was
going to tell her two sons, ages 9 and 11, about yesterday's shooting. She
recalled that she had difficulty talking to them about the slaying of
Louisgene.

"It's kind of hard to explain why a cop shot a man who wasn't a threat to
them," she said. "They were kind of angry. They couldn't believe how the
police who were supposed to serve and protect us could do something like
this. It makes kids leery of police."