A survivor of the mass shooting at the NFL's Midtown Manhattan headquarters last year has filed a lawsuit against New York City, casting blame for the bloodshed on a police officer who was himself killed in the attack. The suit thrusts one of the city's most painful recent tragedies back into the spotlight, and does so from an unusual and contentious angle, by faulting the response of a fallen officer rather than only the gunman who opened fire.
The person behind the lawsuit is Craig Clementi, an employee who worked out of the NFL's offices and was caught in the gunfire. Clementi was shot during the rampage but survived his wounds. Now he has gone to court seeking 24 million dollars in damages from the city, arguing that more should have been done to stop the gunman before the shooting turned deadly for those inside the building.
At the center of his claim is an off-duty New York Police Department detective, Didarul Islam, who was working security at the building when the attack unfolded. According to the lawsuit, Islam should have stopped the gunman from entering the building, and his failure to do so allowed the shooter to make his way inside and open fire on the people who worked there that day.
The allegation is a deeply contentious one, because Islam did not survive the attack either. The detective was among those killed in the shooting, cut down as the violence swept through the building. Casting a slain officer as responsible for failing to prevent the massacre is certain to draw scrutiny and, for many, discomfort, given that he lost his own life in the course of the same rampage.
Clementi's case leans heavily on video. The lawsuit cites newly released footage of the event, which his side points to as evidence for the claim that the gunman could and should have been intercepted before reaching the building's occupants. The emergence of that video appears to have shaped the decision to pursue the city in court and to frame the security failure as the heart of the case.
For the survivors, the legal fight is the latest chapter in a trauma that has not faded. The shooting at the NFL's headquarters ranks among the most shocking acts of violence the city has seen in recent memory, and those who lived through it have been left to grapple with its aftermath long after the gunfire stopped and the building returned to an uneasy normal.
The lawsuit now sets the stage for a difficult reckoning over who bears responsibility for what happened inside the building. The city will have to answer the claim in court, weighing the actions of an officer who died during the attack against a survivor's argument that the gunman should never have been allowed to reach him in the first place.