“There’s no credible evidence at this time to suggest that this was a suicide attempt,” he said.  His statements were echoed by Noel Leader, a co-founder of the group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. Mr. Leader called for a special prosecutor to investigate the matter, and criticized the police department for its response to questions about the shooting.  “You know there is an incestuous relationship between the district attorney’s office and the New York City police department,” he said. “And we really have no confidence, based also on the information that was given by the police commissioner, which is evidently intended to choke this investigation or public opinion in a certain direction.”  The deadly encounter began shortly after officers went into the building at 590 Gates Avenue, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, about 7 p.m. on Monday night. The police said they were responding to a 911 call from Mr. Coppin’s mother reporting domestic abuse and asking for help to “deal with this.” On the call, the police said, a man was overheard threatening to kill her, saying “I have a gun.”  One resident of the building, Andre Sanchez, 17, said that after the police arrived, he saw from the hallway through the open door of the apartment that the officers inside were talking to Mr. Coppin, who was in a bedroom and opening and closing that door as they spoke, possibly with a knife in his hand. One law enforcement official said this morning that during the tense standoff, Mr. Coppin lunged at the officers and shouted “shoot me.”  Eventually, the authorities said, Mr. Coppin climbed out a first-floor window and confronted more officers outside the building, and multiple shots were fired at him. Wounded, Mr. Coppin fell to the ground and was handcuffed, witnesses said. He was taken to Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center, where he was pronounced dead, the police said.  Mr. Kelly said that five people had fired at Mr. Coppin: two police officers and a sergeant from the local housing police station, PSA 3, and a sergeant and a detective assigned to the local 79th Precinct.  Mr. Coppin’s mother was among the people outside the building during the shooting. Earlier in the day, she had called a hospital psychiatric unit asking for urgent help in dealing with her son, the law enforcement official said. Psychiatric workers came, but Mr. Coppin was gone. After waiting two hours, the workers left, and later, Mr. Coppin returned.  Two bystanders who said they had seen the shooting said that Mr. Coppin was not armed, but was carrying a hairbrush when he climbed out the window and that he dropped it when the firing began. The two witnesses also said they both heard one officer yelling for the shooting to stop.  According to the police, another witness described Mr. Coppin as concealing the hairbrush under his shirt, pointing it outward. Mr. Kelly said at the news conference this afternoon that at least 10 different witnesses had provided statements that corroborated the officers’ accounts.  “All 10 witnesses said they heard the officers tell Khiel to stop and show his hands,” he said. “Several people interviewed by police officers said they believed Khiel had a gun under his sweatshirt.” Almost immediately after the shooting, a restless crowd quickly gathered and grew to as many as 150, as some neighbors shouted protests against police brutality. “You need training — this is absurd!” one woman shouted out a window to the police. Another man pressed against a yellow crime-scene tape and said: “I’m not trying to start a riot. I’m just saying it’s not right.”  The site and surrounding blocks were cordoned off as dozens of police officers, detectives and community affairs officers arrived to investigate the shooting and control the crowd. Community leaders at the scene included City Councilman Albert Vann.  Witnesses and the police offered different details about how the shooting occurred.  Mr. Sanchez said that just before the shooting, he went outside and saw several officers there with guns drawn. Mr. Coppin approached the window, backed away, then returned and stood on the sill, Mr. Sanchez said. When an officer told him to get down, he jumped to the ground and started to go through a gate in the fence in front of the building, Mr. Sanchez said.  An officer told Mr. Coppin to put up his hands, and when he did he dropped the hairbrush and the shooting began, although one officer called out to stop the gunfire, Mr. Sanchez said.  Officers started chasing Mr. Sanchez and knocked him to the ground after, he said, he protested: “Why you got to shoot him like that, for nothing?”  A similar description of the shooting was given by Precious Blood, 16, who said she heard about 10 shots fired, most if not all by one officer. Another officer called out: “Stop, stop, stop shooting — he’s down,” she said, but the shooter kept firing, “like he was playing with a toy.”  The law enforcement official gave a different version of the encounter, saying that Mr. Coppin charged toward the officers and refused repeated orders to stop.  The police said they were also exploring the possibility that Mr. Coppin was trying to prompt a shooting, a phenomenon that a handful of studies in recent years have shown can account for a small fraction of police shootings in some American cities. One study by researchers at Harvard Medical School in 1998, for example, looked at all officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles County in a 10-year-period — about 430 shootings in all — and found that “suicide-by-cop” incidents accounted for 11 percent of the shootings over all and 13 percent of the fatal shootings.  After the shooting, Mr. Coppin’s mother went to the 79th Precinct station house and gave a statement to the police, they said.  The officers who fired their guns have not been spoken to by police officials, as is routine in such matters. Under a new policy instituted in September, the five officers were given Breathalyzer sobriety tests immediately after the shooting, and police officials said all five passed that test.  Bruce Lambert and Annie Correal contributed reporting.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said that the shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old Brooklyn man was justified.