Woman shot by cop in 2003 loses bid to sue HBO, filmmaker

Savulich, Andrew

Family members of Vivian Rodriguez react outside hospital after she was shot by cops in Brooklyn in 2003.

An unarmed woman shot in the stomach by an NYPD detective during a raid in Brooklyn has lost her legal fight against a documentary filmmaker and HBO, whom she accused of provoking violence to increase the “entertainment value” of a TV show in development about the elite Emergency Service Unit.

The Appellate Division on Friday affirmed the dismissal of Vivian Rodriguez’s lawsuit alleging that documentarian Eames Yates and HBO conspired with police so that “excessive force would be used in order to maximize the entertainment value of the television program.”

The suit was tossed because, after years of depositions and reviews of video, there was no evidence that the cameraman accompanying ESU had influenced the cops, nor was he even inside the building when Rodriguez was shot.

Her lawyers cited a pitch letter that described the dangerous situations ESU is trained to face, which Rodriguez believes suggested HBO’s expectations for the project.

Rodriguez was hiding in the bathroom of an illegal fencing operation in Williamsburg on Aug. 4, 2003, when ESU cops stormed the basement apartment to execute a search warrant. She was there to make a layaway purchase of stolen goods.

Detective Harriet Stevenson was equipped with a wireless microphone as she battered down the door and cameraman Stephen McCarthy, an independent contractor for Yates, was outside the building. Detective Martin Kane mistook an object in Rodriguez’s hand for a gun and shot her. The microphone picked up the sound of the gunshot.

“Each of the officers involved in the operation testified without contradiction . . . (the cameraman’s) presence had no impact on their conduct whatsoever,” HBO lawyer Jay Ward Brown stated in court papers.

A day after the raid, Mayor Bloomberg acknowledged the shooting was accidental. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly defended the cops’ action, saying they had followed new department procedures put into place after a 57-year-old woman died of a heart attack in a botched raid inside her Harlem apartment.

News reports about the Rodriguez incident make no mention of officials disclosing that a cameraman had tagged along with the ESU team.

Yahoo Local News – New York Daily News

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