AFTERMATH: Protesters in the Bronx wave their wallets, some jeering, "Looks like a gun!"

The four white policemen had fired 41 bullets at the young African immigrant; 19 hit their mark. Prosecutors brought six alternative charges against each of the cops; none of them stuck--neither of the counts of murder, nor the two of manslaughter; not homicide, not reckless endangerment. On Friday, as TV cameras recorded the verdict in an Albany, N.Y., courtroom, the only words that registered were "not guilty," drummed out again and again, 24 times by the time the last defendant was fully cleared. About 140 miles to the south, in New York City, where the killing took place, where it was deemed too explosive to hold a trial, a cold, dull rain deepened the numbness brought on by the news. Anger could muster only brief marches through the Bronx neighborhood where the shooting occurred. One man raised his infant son in the air and pointed to the color of the child's skin. "Shoot him now!" But mostly it was momentary street theater; a demonstration the next day briefly tied up Manhattan traffic, but the shouting soon settled into foul, frustrated meditations on why so many bullets, why so little retribution. Still, the powers that be--or would be--watched warily and, for the most part, chose their words carefully.

 In the courtroom, as the first "not guilty" sounded, the dead man's mother had allowed herself a measure of despair. Her shoulders slumped; her bearing, which had been formidable in the face of four weeks of graphic testimony, finally gave way. As the 24th verdict was uttered, she clutched her brother's hand. Then, with the court adjourned, Kadiatou Diallo walked out, tears streaming down her face, refusing to make eye contact with the four defendants and their families, who were giving themselves up to elation, hugging and making the sign of the cross. The Muslim woman, her ex-husband beside her, spoke calmly at a brief press conference, but her words had a touch more emotion when she got to the sanctuary of her hotel room. "No human being deserves to die like that," she told TIME as she imagined the last moments of her son Amadou. "Standing in front of your doorway where you live. Is that a crime? All he was doing was going home."

 Last week disparate pieces fell together, locked in place, and, suddenly, abstract controversies were framed in a comprehensible melodrama: a mother's search for justice, a city's battle against crime, the skin colors of power and powerlessness, the politics of outrage, the ambitions of a First Lady and a mayor--as well as the men who would be President. With the numbing beat of 24 not-guilty verdicts, racial profiling, police brutality, the rights of minorities and the promises of the Constitution were funneled into a compelling narrative. A different but equally riveting tale is unfolding in Los Angeles, where last week the FBI joined a widening investigation into allegations that antigang cops acted like gangsters themselves--lying, stealing and shooting people with no cause. The arguments about the consequences of policing the police now have a clear dramatic arc; the debate can now be conducted in parables.

 Television had humanized the defendants, and audiences were both perturbed and moved by their relief at acquittal. "They are suffering," said John Patten, the attorney for Officer Sean Carroll. "This has been terribly difficult for them." Kadiatou Diallo sensed all that. The trial, she says, was for the benefit of the four policemen. "Amadou did not come out here," she says. "It was limited to the people who were on trial. No one came to know who Amadou really was." She does not want people to forget who he was and what happened to him.

 He was the good son, the child who always smiled, who never hurt anyone. "He began reading the Koran by himself," Diallo recalls proudly. And always said his prayers, bowing toward Mecca the prescribed five times a day. Perhaps made shy by a youthful stutter, Amadou nevertheless chose to emulate the adventurous example of his father Saikou, a man who had risen from street vendor in West Africa and dodged coups d'etat and other political turmoil to become a businessman with interests in Guinea, Togo, Liberia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore. Amadou had seen those troubles and been to those places, but he wanted to make his mark in America. He loved America, said an uncle, more than the Americans did. Diallo was so eager to live in the U.S. that he applied for the status of political refugee under false pretenses and, once in New York City, took a job as a street vendor selling videotapes, socks, gloves.

 On Feb. 4, 1999, home for Amadou Diallo was an apartment in the Soundview section of the Bronx. It was just after midnight, a time when the city's elite Street Crime Unit could often be seen patrolling the poorest neighborhoods. The SCU's motto said as much: We Own the Night. The unit had been expanded, perhaps too quickly, from 150 undercover officers to nearly 400. Recruits were given only three days of intensive training. The unit belonged to no precinct and was based on one of the islets in the East River, isolated from every borough but having the freedom of the city to search, frisk and arrest. It had been tremendously successful. Though making up less than 2% of the police force, the SCU accounted for more than 20% of the city's gun arrests, reducing the number of weapons by more than 2,000. The murder rate plummeted. But the unit's arrests came at a huge social cost: in 1997 and 1998 it stopped and searched 45,000 men, mostly African Americans and Hispanics, in order to make slightly more than 9,000 arrests. And on Feb. 4, 1999, it came upon Amadou Diallo.
 
 

Officers Kenneth Boss and Sean Carroll (back to camera) embrace after hearing the verdicts

Officers Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss, Richard Murphy and Edward McMellon were looking for a rapist when they spotted Diallo at the front door of his apartment building. And though other witnesses saw and heard things from a distance, the only close-up testimony comes from the cops. Officer Carroll's account would be pivotal to the court case. "The way he was peering up and down the block," said Carroll from the witness stand, had made the police suspicious of Diallo. "He stepped backward, back into the vestibule as we were approaching, like he didn't want to be seen... And I'm trying to figure out what's going on. You know--what's this guy up to? ... I was getting a little leery, from the training, of my past experience of arrests, involving gun arrests."

 The individual turned," recalled Carroll, "looked at us. His hand was on--still on the doorknob, and he starts removing a black object from his right side. And as he pulled the object, all I could see was a top slide--it looked like a slide of a black gun... Believing--believing that he had just pulled, was about to fire the gun at my partner, I fired my weapon."

 A first barrage of bullets by the four officers was followed by a longer second set of shots. Diallo was pinned against the doorway. "There was splintering of wood," said Carroll. "There were sparks. And there appeared to be muzzle blasts coming from where the individual was standing...and I started to shoot at his legs. Because I figured if he's wearing a [bulletproof] vest, the only way to stop him was to take his legs out." Diallo's body had slumped down. "His head was propped up against the wall," said Carroll. "There was an object in his right hand."

 Then Carroll made his discovery. "When I removed the object from his hand, which I believed to be a gun, I grabbed it, and it felt soft. I looked down at it, my left hand, and I seen it was a wallet. I lifted up his shirt a few inches, and I observed two bullet holes to his lower midsection, and said, 'Oh, my God.' I just held him, his hand. I rubbed his face. 'Please don't die.' "

 But Amadou Diallo was dead.

 In the days and weeks afterward, protests and public outrage were all-consuming, even for a city used to fracas and brouhaha. Law-and-order advocates squared off against civil rights activists; columnists sparred and ranted; members of the O.J. Simpson dream team did cameos. In a daily ritual as practiced as a tea ceremony, hundreds of demonstrators, including actress Susan Sarandon and former mayor David Dinkins, got themselves arrested outside police headquarters. The SCU was suspended and then dispersed, its members promoted to detective and sprinkled throughout the police department. And as the presidential-campaign season dawned (and the March 7 date of New York State's primary neared), Al Gore and Bill Bradley were drawn into the debate. The Diallo debacle was at the core of the first question asked of the two candidates at a debate sponsored by TIME and CNN at Harlem's Apollo Theater last week. Both Gore and Bradley fell over themselves to become Commander in Chief of the forces against racial profiling--Bradley promising an Executive Order eliminating racial profiling at the federal level, Gore raising the ante to a national law outlawing racial profiling altogether. 

It was no coincidence that the person who posed the question was the Rev. Al Sharpton, the controversial civil rights activist who has been a champion of the Diallo cause. Sharpton's question was carefully phrased: "We are asking you what concrete steps would you make if you were elected President to deal with police brutality and racial profiling without increasing crime. How would you keep crime down but at the same time confront the problem of police brutality and racial profiling?" After the verdict last week, he urged calm. After years of playing the bombastic gadfly, Sharpton has emerged as the most important black leader in the city, and how he manages the fallout from the Diallo case will not only shape his political future but may also influence the country's most-watched Senate race this fall.

 As for those senatorial wannabes, Hillary Clinton and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, both played to type earlier in the tragedy. She called the killing a murder. He lashed out at those who criticized the cops, calling the demonstrations silly, and saw his mayoral approval rating plummet. After the verdict last week, Giuliani reached out to the Diallo family but spent as much energy calling on angry citizens to "put their prejudices and biases aside. We have racism in New York ... We also have a vicious form of antipolice bias." The First Lady, who had already apologized for the murder remark, was more cautious in her reaction. She asked people "to strive for a better understanding of the incredible risk police face," and for police and citizens "to treat each other with mutual respect." Her remarks seemed to be aimed at avoiding further controversy, while Giuliani, who has been taking heat from this case for a year, was ready to keep taking it. Clinton will probably face growing pressure from liberal supporters to push for the Justice Department's prosecution of the officers on civil rights charges. Giuliani contended that the case did not warrant such a trial, and some observers said the verdict got Giuliani out of a tight spot, since now he can defend the entire jury system instead of just the police.
 
 

His mother: Kadiatou Diallo

Who lost the trial? Most critics point to Bronx district attorney Robert Johnson. For one thing, Johnson, who is African American, chose not to assign any blacks to the prosecution team, which probably meant a less passionate presentation of the case. Race was never articulated as an issue at the trial, even though its presence was pervasive. Prosecutors backed off the defendants when they stood by their stories and appeared remorseful; the government also failed to press key points, including the possibility that Carroll was actually within the vestibule when the shooting started. More than a case lost, however, the trial was won. Defense attorneys had deftly kept their clients from testifying to the grand jury, depriving the prosecution of testimony to mull over until the witnesses actually got to the stand. Carroll's testimony dovetailed with Judge Joseph Teresi's four-hour instruction to the jury of seven white men, four black women and one white woman. He told them they must acquit a defendant if they believed he reasonably but mistakenly thought he had to use deadly force in response to a threat. After 21 hours of actual deliberation, the jury came down on the side of the police. The Justice Department, which has been monitoring the Diallo case from its inception, said it would look into civil rights violations, though most observers believe it will be hard to fault Teresi's court. 

The next move may be the Diallos'. In the fictional life he created to persuade immigration officers to let him stay in America, Amadou Diallo claimed he was a refugee from "ethnic cleansing" in the West African nation of Mauritania, that soldiers had tortured his uncle to death, that they had murdered his parents. Now, his parents, alive, have come back to seek justice for their dead son. After some squabbling, they have settled on how they will administer Amadou's estate. It could be worth a lot, especially if a civil suit against the police department succeeds. It will be the Diallo family's chance to make the city accountable for the acts of the SCU, which one TV commentator called an "unindicted co-conspirator." Even some cops expect a day of reckoning. Says a Brooklyn sergeant: "If there is anyone who should have been on trial, it is the department. Those guys went out for numbers--they didn't go out to kill anyone--but the department wants guns and numbers."

 Kadiatou Diallo cannot yet bring herself to reconcile with the men who killed her son. Last week, the verdict still fresh, her lawyer said that reporters would ask her about Sean Carroll's wish to meet with her. Her response was to fold her arms across her chest. "Only when the person comes and says the truth," she says. "Then forgiveness will come." 

--REPORTED BY ELAINE RIVERA/ALBANY AND EDWARD BARNES, ERIC POOLEY AND WILLIAM DOWELL/NEW YORK
 
 

Four Faces, 41 Shots
The defendants were remorseful during the trial, and may yet face administrative charges

 EDWARD MCMELLON
AGE: 27
FIRED: 16 shots
JOINED N.Y.P.D.: 1993
PROMOTED TO STREET CRIME UNIT: 1998
FELONY ARRESTS: 86 
Five civilian complaints, none deemed to be substantiated; three citations for excellence 

SEAN CARROLL
AGE: 36
FIRED: 16 shots; first officer to shoot
JOINED N.Y.P.D.: 1993
PROMOTED TO STREET CRIME UNIT: 1997
FELONY ARRESTS: 68
Two citations for excellence on duty

 RICHARD MURPHY
AGE: 26
FIRED: four shots
JOINED N.Y.P.D.: 1994
PROMOTED TO STREET CRIME UNIT: 1998
FELONY ARRESTS: 55 
No civilian complaints

 KENNETH BOSS
AGE: 28
FIRED: five shots
JOINED N.Y.P.D.: 1992
PROMOTED TO STREET CRIME UNIT: 1998
FELONY ARRESTS: 97
One complaint involving a fatal shooting; 23 citations for excellence on duty
 

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