Albany police shot and paralyzed a teen. The DA justified it.
The Appeal | Published March 22, 2019
By AARON MORRISON
The last day Ellazar Williams had full use of his legs was Aug. 20, 2018.
It was an 80-degree day—warm enough that Williams, 19, could walk around without a shirt. That’s how he appeared in surveillance footage captured that afternoon by cameras at R & A Grocery. In the footage released by the Albany County District Attorney’s Office, Williams can be seen entering the market with a male companion. Williams’s companion argued with the store’s owner before they left without incident.
When they returned to the market a few hours later, a minor disturbance ensued, according to the DA’s office. An object was thrown at the storefront. None of the surveillance cameras showed Williams as the thrower. When he was seen again on surveillance, the teenager was no longer shirtless. He wore a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt and jeans.
A store employee phoned police, telling them that a Black man wearing a gray hoodie and blue, faded jeans had flashed a gun and threatened to use it.
“A whole bunch of people came to the front of the store,” the caller told an Albany police dispatcher. “They brought guns, and they threw a water bottle at the door.”
At approximately 4:30 p.m., Albany Police Detective James Olsen, along with Detectives Christopher Cornell and Lawrence Heid, responded to the call. Williams, walking in the area with a group of young men, fit the 911 caller’s description.
“Police, stop!” yelled Heid, who drove Olsen and Cornell in an unmarked vehicle.
Surveillance cameras recorded Williams as he fled on foot, running into a gated courtyard behind a school. Olsen got out of the car to chase Williams. Although neither of them could see Olsen or Williams, according to authorities, Heid and Cornell claimed they heard their colleague command the teenager to “drop it” and get on the ground.
Then two shots rang out.
Olsen later said he opened fire because Williams ran toward him with a shiny object and, suspecting it was a weapon, he feared for his life and the lives of his colleagues. Williams dropped the object, authorities claimed. But surveillance cameras didn’t clearly capture that part. Footage only shows Williams running from the officer, tripping and getting back up, before he continued to flee. Olsen shot Williams in the back.
Albany police didn’t recover a gun from Williams. However, officers found a large hunting knife nearby. At the hospital where Williams was treated, staff removed a knife sheath from Williams’s jeans and gave it to Albany police detectives. The sheath fit the knife.
One of the two bullets Olsen fired at Williams was lodged in the teen’s spine. Just a few hours after he first appeared at the West Hill market, Williams laid paralyzed from the chest down in Albany Medical Center. More than seven months later, Williams’s attorneys say he is permanently paralyzed.
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The shooting has frayed the already damaged relationship between Albany residents and law enforcement, community advocates told The Appeal. For years, the city’s police, clergy and activists had worked to build trust through a series of initiatives that kept some people from coming into unnecessary contact with the criminal legal system. But at the same time, the city was grappling with gun violence concentrated in majority-Black neighborhoods (the city is 55 percent white and 29 percent Black).
By August 2018, police recorded at least 43 shootings and 10 homicides for the year, with nearly half of them occurring in the West Hill neighborhood where Williams was shot. Law enforcement responded to the spate of violence by tasking police detectives with removing illegal street guns in an operation that mostly targeted the capital city’s Black, Latinx and poor-to-working-class neighborhoods. The shooting, and the way city leaders have handled the fallout, has worsened tensions with law enforcement, community advocates said.
While activists called for accountability in the wake of the Williams shooting, Albany County District Attorney David Soares quickly brought criminal charges against the paralyzed teenager. Although surveillance cameras did not catch the moment when Olsen said Williams charged at him with a knife, Soares sought Williams’s indictment for felony menacing of a police officer and misdemeanor weapons possession.
Meanwhile, the DA’s office investigated Olsen’s use of force. The parallel investigation was carried out by the office’s investigative unit, which community activists have criticized as blatantly unfair to Williams. Six of the unit’s nine investigators are former Albany police officers, including two detectives who worked with Olsen. Those investigators have a lot of influence over what’s presented to the grand jury, said Paul Grondahl, a weekly columnist for the Albany Times Union.
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