Commentary
Blood stains still mark the driveway on Calumet Place where the wounded Jose Hernandez-Rossy attempted to flee police.
Blood stains still mark the driveway on Calumet Place where the wounded Jose Hernandez-Rossy attempted to flee police.

Questions About Sunday's Black Rock Shooting

by / May. 10, 2017 12am EST

A horrific incident unfolded last Sunday in Black Rock after a traffic stop on a quiet, residential street. What exactly happened is hard to determine so soon after the haze of violence, but it all occurred in broad daylight in front of a lot of eyes.

Police say that soon after pulling a driver over, one officer, Joseph Acquino, was shot in the head and the suspect was shot in the shoulder. Police say that an officer fired on the suspect while in pursuit, and that the suspect was arrested “without incident” a few blocks away and transported to Kenmore Mercy Hospital. A few hours later, police revealed that Acquino was in surgery to reattach his ear at ECMC and expected to survive, while the suspect died Sunday night.

The suspect’s name was Jose Hernandez-Rossy, and as soon as the Buffalo News identified him on Monday, they published the 26-year-old’s rap sheet of petty crime, continuing a fine tradition at least as old as the City Grill shootings in 2010, when the News published the legal entanglements of homicide victims.

Without pretending to exculpate Hernandez-Rossy, we should keep both sides of the sword sharpened. There are many questions, oddities, and curious histories revealed in the strange aftermath, questions that tend to be overshadowed by the serious nature of Acquino’s injury. The violence didn’t end with an injured officer; another man was killed, and as we’ve seen in other cases, there are officers on the BPD whose practice of policing navigates murky Constitutional waters. There are no performance evaluations in the BPD, and the Common Council’s Police Oversight Committee meets only twice a year. The department’s efforts to train police in use of force and de-escalation tactics are virtually non-existent. Meanwhile, Mayor Byron Brown’s signature zero tolerance police policy allows officers wide latitude and an open checkbook.  

Acquino, who has been with the BPD since 2012, is on track to earn around $126,000 and his base salary is $73,251, according to public information. This is not meant to incriminate Acquino in any way for anything he has done; police deserve to be paid well, and no one showing up for work in public service deserves to lose an ear for it. But it’s true that more aggressive policing provides rewards for officers in the form of overtime and court time. Some of the highest-paid public employees in the city are BPD’s Strike Force officers.

Here are some of our questions.


The trail of blood on Calumet Place.

Why was this car stopped?

Officially, police are saying the stop was routine, but they haven’t said what caused police to stop the driver. Did he run a stop sign, fail to signal a turn, neglect his registration or inspection? Whatever it was, for the second time in three months, we have a citizen dying by police hands in a situation where the reason for initial police intervention has not been immediately communicated by the Buffalo Police.

Public records indicate that Acquino is assigned to the BPD’s Housing Unit. But what is a Housing Unit car doing on Hartman Place in Black Rock, on a quiet side street more than a mile from the nearest public housing at Schaffer Village on Ontario Street? Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority contracts with the BPD to provide police services to public housing sites scattered all over the city. Even if Acquino was traveling between BMHA sites, he would have to have gone out of his way to find himself on at the intersection of Hartman and Garfield Street.

The News reported Monday night that Acquino had a past with encounter with Hernandez-Rossy: Allegedly, Acquino was injured when Hernandez-Rossy unexpectedly sped away from another routine traffic stop. It’s possible Acquino saw Hernandez-Rossy on Niagara Street and decided to follow him down a side street while checking his plates for verification. 

The Housing Unit shares office space with the BPD’s Strike Force in the Perry Homes public housing complex. The Strike Force and Housing Units have been at the epicenter of Buffalo’s questionable policing practices, whether it’s arresting people under dubious trespassing pretenses or instituting daily “crime suppression” checkpoints in poorer, predominantly African-American neighborhoods—checkpoints that legal scholars have called unconstitutional and researchers have called ineffective.


A memorial to Jose “Chucho” Hernandez-Rossy stands at the corner of Garfield and Tonawanda streets​.

Then what the hell happened? And how?

Last year, Acquino, then with Strike Force, potentially saved a few lives during a foot chase in the Schiller Park area on Buffalo’s East Side, according to police accounts. Officers claimed to have watched a suspect engage in a robbery; after chasing the suspect down, another officer wound up with a gun pressed to his chest. Fortunately, the safety was still on and Acquino was able to disarm and restrain the man.

About a month after this, Acquino was also one of four officers who cornered Arthur Jordan, Jr. in a Metro PCS store at Main and Fillmore, an incident US Magistrate Judge H. Kenneth Schroeder said reminded him of police practices that have been held as unconstitutional in other cities, like stop-and-frisk and loitering arrests. Jordan was wanted for questioning by the FBI for a reckless Facebook post encouraging violence against police during a week that saw two high-profile deaths of unarmed black men by police hands. Led by Joseph Acquino’s brother, Michael Acquino, the officers detained Jordan without putting him under arrest. There was no warrant or 911 call. The Public was able to review the video of this incident last December during a suppression hearing in federal court. The four officers took hold of his body, bent him back against the counter, and discovered a weapon in his back pocket. Pinned against the counter, Jordan was then pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, and then punched. 

The case remains before Judge Schroeder, but in March Jordan’s attorney Martin J. Vogelbaum submitted a brief citing US vs. Hensley, a 1985 Supreme Court decision with clear parallels to Jordan’s case where a search for a robbery suspect netted gun charges against a motorist with a checkered past. The Supreme Court was unanimous in holding that the police intervention was in violation of the Fourth Amendment.  

Could the unconventional and aggressive tactics used by some factions of the BPD have contributed to Sunday’s traffic stop spilling over into violence? Again, no one in public service deserves to be put in harm’s way unnecessarily, but given prior incidents and the BPD’s utter lack of hand-to-hand and de-escalation training, and the lack of information regarding the stop and what ensued afterward, the question must be asked.

Police are staying mum about what was found in Hernandez-Rossy’s car, but the News’s police sources, one of whom is almost certainly perennial PBA attorney Thomas Burton, are saying a large amount of heroin and cocaine was found in the car.

Could whatever happened have been triggered by drugs, fear of being caught with drugs, or simply fear of being killed by the police only three months after Wardel Davis died in an encounter with police?

“I don’t profess to understand what goes on in the minds of all people,” Judge Schroeder said from the bench at the Jordan suppression hearing last December. “But I know from professional experience, from my sitting on the bench, from my being exposed to news videos and newscasts, that certain people, by reason of their background, economically, ethnically, culturally, react in different ways when confronted with authority.

“People get nervous when they’re stopped for a vehicle and T stop. They get nervous.”

According to the police account of what happened, Hernandez-Rossy apparently took it a step farther beyond nervous, and it cost him his life.

Where’s the gun?

As of our deadline, police are still looking for the gun Hernandez-Rossy allegedly used to shoot Acquino in the ear. Thus, it remains unclear whether Acquino was shot by a gun Hernandez-Rossy possessed; or if Acquino was shot by his own weapon, which the suspect managed to wrestle away from him; or if Acquino was struck by friendly fire during a violent struggle; or whether the suspect remained armed as he fled; or even if the suspect had a gun to begin with or at any point during the incident. Multiple accounts say that Acquino’s partner, Justin Tedesco, shot at Hernandez-Rossy as he fled down on a street where only moments before children had been outside playing.

For all the police officers on the scene and all the neighbors on this densely populated street, not one has yet mentioned him running with a gun, or being seen with a gun, or discarding a gun during the relatively brief chase.

If Hernandez-Rossy fired his own weapon, as the police search for the gun suggests, ballistics tests, gunpowder residue on Hernandez-Rossy’s hands, and shell casings at the scene would all support that version of events. None of this information has yet been released.

When was Rossy shot? Was he shot while fleeing the scene?

If Hernandez-Rossy was unarmed at the time he was shot, the New York Attorney General’s office may open an investigation, just as they are investigating the February death of Wardel “Meech” Davis in police custody. Eric Schneiderman’s office released the following statement regarding the incident: “We are reviewing the incident to determine whether or not it falls within the AG’s jurisdiction under the Executive Order.”

The weapon allegedly used against Acquino has not yet been found, although dozens of officers combed the neighborhood Sunday and Monday. A bystander who at one point was only a few feet away from the injured Acquino said she somehow missed that he had been shot at all, apparently not having heard a gunshot.

“We did not see the officer get shot, we just saw his ear hanging, we don’t understand how we missed that,” recounted a witness to the Buffalo News in the immediate aftermath.

After jumping fences through backyards for roughly three blocks, he collapsed in the driveway at 568 Tonawanda Street, according to a witness interviewed by the News. He begged the neighbors there not to call the only people that could help save his life, the Buffalo Police.

One last question…

Why was Rossy not also brought to ECMC, the area hospital with the greatest expertise and resources of medical trauma of that nature?

UPDATE: At deadline, we learned that the New York State Attorney General’s office will assume the investigation of the incident, because police have not found the gun that Hernandez-Rossy is alleged to have used to shoot Acquino. 

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