Larry Davis

Larry Davis (May 28, 1966 – February 20, 2008), later known as Adam Abdul-Hakeem, was a man from New York City who gained notoriety in November 1986 for his shootout in the South Bronx with officers of the New York City Police Department, in which six officers were shot.

Davis, asserting self-defense, was acquitted of all charges aside from illegal gun possession.

Davis's arrest record, beginning in early 1983, included a 1984 robbery conviction and subsequent probation violation.

On November 19, 1986, nine New York City police officers, with nearly 20 outside the building, raided the Bronx apartment of Davis's sister.

Davis escaped the ensuing shootout after a shotgun round creased his scalp, and all six officers who had been shot survived.

Police explained the raid as an attempt to question Davis as a multiple-murder suspect, finally obtained an arrest warrant for that, and re-explained the raid as an attempt to arrest him.

Davis had one child, a daughter Larrima Davis, born in 1986.

By the November 1986 shootout, a court hearing for that violation had been postponed four times.

Soon after the successful manhunt, the Bronx District Attorney's office alleged that, as The New York Times then paraphrased, "Davis was part of a small, loosely organized, 'very violent' group of gunmen who have robbed, assaulted and slain drug dealers in the Bronx and northern Manhattan in recent months".

Approaching trial, the district attorney's office had one witness outside of law enforcement: Roy L. Gray, who admitted under oath to steering "traffic to coke spots."

Allegedly, on October 26, 1986, in Manhattan's Washington Heights section, Gray was robbed of $2, and four days later, October 30, in the borough's Harlem section, spotted the robber, later understood as Davis, about to rob some cocaine dealers, too.

Reportedly, Gray thus alerted the police, and then rode in the police car that chased the getaway car, carrying Davis and two other men, to the Bronx's Highbridge section, where, along Jerome Avenue, upon issuing three gunshots at the police, the three men evaded arrest by vanishing into an apartment building.

In early November, acting on a tip, police sought Davis but failed to find him at his sister's apartment at 1231 Fulton Avenue in the Bronx's Morrisania section.

They returned to the apartment on November 19, when the infamous shootout occurred.

After it, the police department explained the raid as an effort to question him, but later re-explained it as an attempt to arrest him, albeit without an arrest warrant.

Months later, after the police alleged a Jerome Avenue car chase with gunshots fired at police 20 days before the infamous raid, "officials from the Bronx District Attorney's office and the Police Department deflected questions about why no warrant had been issued for Mr. Davis's arrest after the Jerome Avenue incident. Each agency referred questions to the other."

At some point, a senior police official argued that "once you move to introduce an accusatory instrument, you lose the benefit of being able to talk to that person."

In any case, the police reported that Gray, as a robbery victim of Davis, examined photos and provided the "positive identification" of Davis, that Davis's fingerprints were in the getaway car, that two shell casings, recovered from the scene, matched the pistol on Davis at his December 6 arrest, and that ballistics tests tied this gun to the killings of four suspected drug dealers in Manhattan just hours before the October 30 car chase from Manhattan to the Bronx.

Davis maintained, instead, that the police had framed him for these murders.

Similarly, Davis's attorneys William Kunstler and Lynne Stewart as well as Davis's peers and family all contended that, five years before the shootout, certain police officers had recruited Davis, age 15, to deal drugs under their sponsorship, and then turned a blind eye to the dealing of Davis's associates who began working under him; but then began harassing them and communicating death threats for Davis once he stopped dealing drugs in late 1986 while withholding drug proceeds, reputedly some $40,000.

In March 1988, on jury trial for a killing of four drug dealers—allegedly the 1986 raid's reason—Davis was acquitted.

Then, in November, as to the nine raiding and six shot officers, his acquittal of aggravated assault and attempted murder triggered widespread outrage.

About 1,000 New York City police officers publicly demonstrated.

Yet for many others, Davis became a folk hero.

Still others thought of him as an unsavory character, but probably truthful about the police and the shootout.

Serving five to 15 years on the November 1988 convictions for illegal gun possession, Davis was acquitted of another alleged drug dealer's murder.

But in a third murder trial, about another alleged drug dealer, Davis was convicted, and sentenced to 25 years to life.

After converting to Islam, he changed his name.

Maintaining his innocence, he continued to allege that the police had framed him.

A prevalent view attributes his infamous acquittal, rather, to racial bias by a proverbial "Bronx jury."

But particularly with the Mollen Commission's 1990s exposure of widespread criminality, including drug dealing and violence, by New York City police officers, and then a 2003 independent documentary favoring Davis's explanation, his story continues to provoke divided reactions.

An aspiring rapper, Davis was known by peers as musically talented, playing multiple instruments.

He was also entrepreneurial, reputedly operating small music studios in the Bronx and Manhattan, while also repairing and modifying motorcycles.

Davis's peers acknowledge that by midway through adolescence, Davis was dealing drugs, but claim that he ceased once the woman expecting his first child miscarried and then he learned of her crack use, which he blamed for the miscarriage.

Davis was later convicted in April 1991 of a Bronx drug dealer's 1986 murder.

In 2008, Davis died via stabbing by a fellow inmate.

On the 17th day of a massive manhunt, he was traced to a Bronx building, where he hid in an unknown family's unit.

Telephoned by the police, he claimed to hold its occupants hostage.

After tireless negotiations that lasted all night long, Davis was eventually convinced that the police officers would not shoot him because of all the media presence, so he then decided that it was time for him to surrender peacefully.

Davis's legal defense, led by William Kunstler, contended that the raid was a pretense to murder Davis for knowledge of officers' alleged complicity in illicit drug sales and to punish him for abandoning his own drug dealing under them.