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to get nervous, too, because it seemed to him that the reason Diallo was turning his body sideways was that he wanted to hide whatever he was doing with his right hand.

“We were probably at the top steps of the vestibule, trying to get to him before he got through that door,” Carroll remembered. “The individual turned, 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 — it looked like the slide of a black gun. My prior experience and training, my prior arrests, dictated to me that this person was pulling a gun.”

Carroll yelled out, “Gun! He’s got a gun!”

Diallo didn’t stop. He continued pulling on something in his pocket, and now he began to raise the black object in the direction of the officers. Carroll opened fire. McMellon instinctively jumped backward off the step and landed on his backside, firing as he flew through the air. As his bullets ricocheted around the vestibule, Carroll assumed that they came from Diallo’s gun, and when he saw McMellon flying backward, he assumed that McMellon had been shot by Diallo, so he kept shooting, aiming, as police are taught to do, for “center mass.” There were pieces of cement and splinters of wood flying in every direction, and the air was electric with the flash of gun muzzles and the sparks from the bullets.

Boss and Murphy were now out of the car as well, running toward the building. “I saw Ed McMellon,” Boss would later testify, when the four officers were brought to trial on charges of first-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder. “He was on the left side of the vestibule and just came flying off that step all the way down. And at the same time, Sean Carroll is on the right-hand side, and he is coming down the stairs. It was frantic. He was running down the stairs, and it was just — it was intense. He was just doing whatever he could to retreat off those stairs. And Ed was on the ground. Shots are still going off. I’m running. I’m moving. And Ed was shot. That’s all I could see. Ed was firing his weapon. Sean was firing his weapon into the vestibule…. And then I see Mr. Diallo. He is in the rear of the vestibule, in the back, towards the back wall, where that inner door is. He is a little bit off to the side of that door and he is crouched. He is crouched and he has his hand out and I see a gun. And I said, ‘My God, I’m going to die.’ I fired my weapon. I fired it as I was pushing myself backward and then I jumped off to the left. I was out of the line of fire.… His knees were bent. His back was straight up. And what it looked like was somebody trying to make a smaller target. It looked like a combat stance, the same one that I was taught in the police academy.”

At that point, the attorney questioning Boss interrupted: “And how was his hand?”

“It was out.”

“Straight out?”

“Straight out.”

“And in his hand you saw an object. Is that correct?”

“Yeah, I thought I saw a gun in his hand.… What I seen was an entire weapon. A square weapon in his hand. It looked to me at that split second, after all the gunshots around me and the gun smoke and Ed McMellon down, that he was holding a gun and that he had just shot Ed and that I was next.”

Carroll and McMellon fired sixteen shots each: an entire clip. Boss fired five shots. Murphy fired four shots. There was silence. Guns drawn, they climbed the stairs and approached Diallo. “I seen his right hand,” Boss said later. “It was out from his body. His palm was open. And where there should have been a gun, there was a wallet.… I said, ‘Where’s the fucking gun?’ ”

Boss ran up the street toward Westchester Avenue because he had lost track in the shouting and the shooting of where they were. Later, when the ambulances arrived, he was so distraught, he could not speak.

Carroll sat down on the steps, next to Diallo’s bullet-ridden body, and started to cry.

1. Three Fatal Mistakes

Perhaps the most common — and the most important — forms of rapid cognition