Saheed Vassell's Family To Sue City And NYPD For $25M: Report

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — Saheed Vassell’s family will sue the city and the NYPD for $25 million after officers, who mistakenly believed the bipolar man had a gun, shot him dead, according to reports.

Attorneys will argue that the police officers who shot Vassell in Crown Heights on April 4 knew the 34-year-old man “did not pose a threat to the life, health and safety of the police officers and third persons,” according to a Daily News report.

The three-page statement — filed by the family's lawyers, Robinson Iglesias and Michael Hueston — accuses the officers of shooting Vassell nine times without first trying to calm a man who posed no real threat to the people around him, the News reported.

NYPD officers fatally shot Vassell after three 911 callers reported he was pointing something that looked like a gun at something that looked like a gun at pedestrians, but what turned out to be a metal pipe.

“The police shot an unarmed mentally ill man because the NYPD doesn’t adequately train its police officers on how to deal with the emotionally disturbed,” Iglesias told the Daily News.

Residents and family members who remembered Vassell as a loving and nonviolent man were outraged that police officers — whom the NYPD has yet to identify — shot Vassell, then released limit information about his death.

“It seems like public officials and the NYPD trying to hide something," the Vassells said in a statement released earlier this month. "It's unconscionable that a month after NYPD officers murdered our son Saheed, Mayor de Blasio is still refusing to provide basic transparency that can help ensure accountability for his killing."

"They murdered my son and I want justice for him," Lorna Vassell told the protesters that gathered one day after his death at Utica Avenue and Montgomery Street, where he was shot. "Saheed came from a good family and they had no right to shoot him down."

"He was a humble soul," said Vassell’s uncle Milton Williams, outside his funeral on April 20. "You could see he was loved based on the turnout of everyone who came here from the neighborhood."

Former attorney general Eric Schneiderman promised his office would investigate the shooting in April, one month before he resigned from his post.

Any proceeds from the lawsuit will go to Vassell’s 15-year-old son Tyshawn, according to the Daily News.

Photos by Kathleen Culliton