At a demonstration outside of the Elizabeth Police Department, Deiby Salcedo’s voice is nearly drowned out by yells for “Justice for Stiven” blasted through a bullhorn directly behind him. But a few feet away from the gathering, the hurt in his voice is loud and clear: “They killed him,” Deiby, who’s from Colombia, tells me in Spanish. “They killed my brother.”
Just weeks ago, his brother, Estiben Alegria-Hurtado, was fatally shot by an Elizabeth police officer who was responding to a 911 call reporting “a dispute and an unwanted individual” at the Amity Street home where he lived. He and Deiby’s former partner, who also lived there, had gotten into a heated scuffle. When police arrived at the residence on the morning of July 29, a little after 8 a.m., they found Estiben erratically lunging towards her with a large kitchen knife.
“My brother arrived at the home upset, he had been drinking and was acting somewhat aggressively,” says Deiby, who wasn’t there at the time. “She surely didn’t like that and that’s where the problem began.” But “it was a family problem,” he says. “It could’ve and should’ve been resolved as such,” he tells me. He sighs and shakes his head.
He says his brother was not a bad man. He was a great brother. And a great father. Hardworking. He only acted up when he drank. He says he still can’t believe what happened, happened.
He wishes the police hadn’t been called at all. And wishes the officers who were had handled things differently. “But instead of making things better,” he says. “All police did was make things worse.”
Footage from the officers’ body-worn cameras show they entered the home through an unlocked front door and into a hectic scene: A woman yelling, two men desperately trying to apprehend a third, and that third man — Estiben — flailing a large kitchen knife at the woman, who was fearfully crouching down in a nearby stairwell.
And then came the fateful single shot, at close range. Immediately after, the woman is heard frantically repeating, “he tried to kill me, he was trying to kill me.”
Undoubtedly, the struggle was brief and frenzied. And deeply unfortunate because it resulted in the incredibly devastating and irrevocable loss of Estiben’s life. But was the officer in the wrong? Was his shooting of Estiben one that can be deemed justifiable? And could there possibly have been a different — no, a better — outcome?
Deiby Salcedo (in center), brother of Estiben Alegria-Hurtado, holds a sign at a balloon releasing ceremony for Estiben. Estiben was killed on July 29 by an Elizabeth police officer who was responding to a 911 call of a domestic dispute at his home. Friends and family gathered at Elizabeth Police Department to release balloons in memory of Estiben on Friday, August 11, 2023. Jeff Rhode | For NJ Advance Media
Deiby says he likes to think so. “There are many ways to stop someone [from hurting someone else],” he says in Spanish. “It didn’t have to come to this. They didn’t have to kill him. Now, all I have left is my suffering. I wasn’t prepared for this kind of pain.”
Social justice advocates in Elizabeth, who rushed to the family’s side in support, are vehement in their criticism of police. And so is Sanford Rubenstein, an attorney for the family. At a press conference at the Attorney General’s satellite office in Cedar Knolls after the release of the body-cam footage, both the advocates and the attorney excoriated police for what they view as “excessive force.”
Rubenstein told reporters it was a case of “shoot first, ask questions later.”
“No attempt to de-escalate a man with a knife,” he said. “No attempt to use a Taser.”
He’s not wrong. I watched the footage nearly two dozen times. Pausing. Rewinding. Trying to make sense of what happened during the minute-and-a-half encounter and of what didn’t. There was no “drop the weapon,” no de-escalation.
But it’s hard to say there also wasn’t something else: imminent danger. Not for the officers, but for that woman who was on the other side of Estiben’s knife. And isn’t that the threshold for “justified” police force as outlined in New Jersey’s Use of Force Policy? That “it prevents bodily harm to the officer or to another person” and “protects the officer or a third party from unlawful force.”
The policy also stipulates that officers have a duty to de-escalate, stating force should only be used as a last resort when lawful objectives “cannot reasonably be achieved” through verbal commands or other means. Wasn’t this incident one of those times in which it couldn’t “reasonably be achieved” otherwise?
Since the day of the shooting, much has been said about what the officer could’ve or should’ve done. Three experts, who have studied police shootings and who saw footage of the incident, explained that for officers, making tough calls is sometimes inevitable.
The “extremely chaotic, fast-moving and confusing situation” the Elizabeth officers walked into, says Jacinta Gau, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida, is “highly indicative” of the stressful, unpredictable scenarios police regularly encounter on the job.
“They come into a residence like this, someone’s made a 911 call, things are frantic. They don’t know what’s happening, they don’t have anybody’s mental health or behavioral history. They don’t have the luxury of knowing everything about the parties involved or the relationships between them,” she says.
“All they have is the facts in front of them and are often forced to make quick on-the-spot decisions.”
In this situation, she says, what was in front of them was a man wielding a knife. Gau says “issuing commands, trying to start off with a less lethal weapon, these are all things officers do when time is on their side, when there’s an opportunity for them to intervene before things get worse.” She adds: “My take on this scenario is that that opportunity was likely not present.”
Jason M. Williams, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University, disagrees. “There needs to be room for de-escalatory tactics even in situations in which officers are within their rights to use force to stop a felonious act,” he says. “What if they had asked [Estiben] to drop the knife? He probably would’ve.”
But Gau says playing the “what if” game here is tricky. “What if the officers had shown up a minute later and those two men had subdued the man and taken the knife away from him?” she asks. “But what if they had shown up a minute later and that man had already killed that woman?”
Or what if the officer didn’t shoot and Estiben killed her right in front of them? In short, says Richard Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics at the University of Pennsylvania, this is a case where “20-20 hindsight can be pretty myopic.”
In the end, the state Office of Public Integrity and Accountability, tasked with investigating all fatal encounters between police and the public, may well find the shooting legal and justified. And if that’s the case, then what? Who do we blame? And what do we do with all this hurt and heartbreak over the painful loss of yet another one of our own?
We come to terms with the fact that not every man of color killed by police is George Floyd. We come to terms with the sad, hard realization that we’ve been wounded and wronged for so long by those who are supposed to protect us, and that because of it our trust in them is so eroded, that even in instances in which they’re likely in the right — we can’t see it.
We come to terms with the fact that “justified” or not, a beloved father and brother is no longer with us in this world. And that we won’t stop, even for a second, wishing with all our hearts that he were.
We cry. We curse. We pray. We grieve. And hopefully in time and with God’s almighty grace, we heal.
Estiben’s family has set up a GoFundMe to raise funds to cover his funeral expenses. If you’d like to donate, you can do so here.
Daysi Calavia-Robertson may be reached at dcalavia-robertson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Instagram at @presspassdaysi or Twitter @presspassdaysi. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Here’s how to submit an op-ed or Letter to the Editor. Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow us on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and on Facebook at NJ.com Opinion. Get the latest news updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.com’s newsletters.