Larry Davis

Interviewed the next day, Regina Lewis reportedly once she answered a door knock, the police entered the living room with guns drawn, ordered the adults to get the children out, and called, "Come out, Larry, you don't have a chance—we've got you surrounded." At trial, the police alleged that Davis had fired first. The jury believed the events presented by the defense, in which an officer entered the apartment with a shotgun and fired at Davis, while he was seated behind a desk holding his baby. The officer, thinking he had hit Davis, was then shot in the neck by Davis with a handgun. The police took cover, returning fire as they retreated. In the confusion, no one kept track of Davis, who slipped into his other sister's apartment and escaped out a back window. Lewis had complained to her brother about him bringing guns to the apartment and told him to get out; he did leave but returned. She also quoted him as telling her, "If I'm caught in the street, the police are going to shoot me. But I am going to shoot them first."

Despite three trials in two years, prosecutors were unable to convince a jury of that Larry Davis was guilty for any but the weapons charge—the ones he used in shooting the police officers—until a jury convicted him and his brother, Eddie Davis, in the August 1986 killing of a drug dealer.

The jury found conflicting testimony from witnesses, and discrepancies in times stated by prosecution witnesses. After deliberating for nine days—then the longest in Bronx history for a single defendant—the jury acquitted Davis.

Davis was serving his sentence at Shawangunk Correctional Facility near the Ulster County hamlet of Wallkill. At approximately 7 p.m. on February 20, 2008, a correctional officer overseeing the block yard noticed inmates congregating around an argument between two inmates. When the officer went to break it up, he found Davis using his walking cane to fend off an inmate from attacking him with a 9 inch (23 cm) long metal shiv. Davis was unsuccessful and was stabbed numerous times. The officer called for assistance and the attacker was restrained and taken to the Special Housing Unit to remain in segregated custody. Davis was taken to the facility infirmary where first aid was rendered. Davis lost much blood, lost consciousness and eventually showed no vital signs. Not being a trauma level infirmary, the supervising nurse called for an emergency transport by ambulance to St. Luke's Hospital in nearby Newburgh, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

On July 31, 2008, an Ulster County grand jury indicted Rosado on nine felony charges related to the stabbing, including three different counts of murder, assault, criminal possession of a weapon and possession of prison contraband. The murder charges carried a potential sentence of life without parole. After his arrest, Rosado was moved to Clinton Correctional Facility, located in upstate New York close to the Canadian border. On Wednesday, February 25, 2009, Luis Rosado pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in Ulster County Court and was sentenced to an additional 10 years in prison, to be served consecutively with his current 25-to-life sentence for murder.

While serving five to 15 years on the gun conviction, Davis was acquitted in another murder trial. But in yet another murder trial, likewise about an alleged drug dealer, Davis, alike his brother in a separate trial, was convicted, and Davis was sentenced to 25 years to life. Meanwhile, he converted to Islam and took a new name. Maintaining his innocence, he would continue to allege that the police had framed him. Particularly with an independent documentary, released in 2003, favorable to his and his attorneys' explanation of his shootout with police, the story of Larry Davis has continued to provoke divided reactions about the putative bias and corruption of law enforcement and mainstream media. In 2008, he died via stabbing by another inmate.

Larry Davis's trial began five months later. On the night of March 14, 1991, the jury found him guilty. Already serving 5 to 15 years on weapons convictions, Larry received another 25 years to life. Once sentenced, creating a loud scene until the judge expelled him, Davis spoke for about an hour, airing again his longstanding complaint that the police and the judicial system were conducting a vendetta against him.

David went on trial for the murder n October 1989. The prosecution accused Davis of robbing two drug dealers when surprised by Lagombra walking into the apartment, prompting Davis's "cold-blooded act of savagery." Ballistics tests tied Davis's 32-caliber revolver to the killing. Two defense witnesses testified that, on the day of the murder, Davis was in Florida making a rap album.

After the five-week trial, the jury returned from its three-day deliberation on a Saturday night, December 4, 1989, with the verdict, again not guilty. Although not Davis's attorney in this case, William Kunstler repeated that Davis had helped rogue police officers sell drugs, and said that the chronic accusations against Davis reflect a conspiracy.

Davis's attorneys, including William Kunstler, depicted the police raid as a pretense to murder Davis, both to silence his knowledge of officers' involvement in local drug trafficking and to punish him for reneging on his own, related agreement with them. In March 1988, on jury trial for killing four drug dealers—allegedly why the police had initially sought him—Davis was acquitted. In November, although convicting him of illegal gun possession, a jury acquitted him of attempted murder and of aggravated assault on the officers. Among the many outraged, some 1000 police officers publicly demonstrated, whereas others, particularly among urban blacks, celebrated Davis as a folk hero who successfuly resisted the allegedly corrupt police.

On November 20, 1988, after deliberating 38 hours over five days, the jury acquitted Davis of all charges, except six counts of criminal possession of a weapon. Interviewed afterward, the jury forewoman said Davis was a "young and innocent kid who got recruited by a few corrupt policemen." McCarren, most seriously wounded, forced into retirement, called it "a racist verdict," and added, "The day this happened, a bunch of good honest police officers went to lock up Larry Davis because he had killed people, and not for anything else." Defense attorney Kunstler said, "The jury understood what happened—that he acted in self-defense." Defense attorney Stewart quipped, "I really think that the black community is no longer going to have black Sambos—they're going to have black Rambos."

In January 1987, Davis's older brother Eddie Davis was arrested and charged. Allegedly, Eddie and Larry, along with two others, attempting robbery at a Webster Avenue apartment, shot through the door, killing Vizcaino. A jury convicted Eddie Davis in June 1989.

On November 19, 1986, reportedly to question or to arrest Davis as a suspect in the murders of four suspected drug dealers, nine City of New York Police Department officers, backed up by nearly 20 others outside the building, raided his sister's apartment in the Bronx. In the resulting shootout, Davis, a black man, then 20 years old, shot six officers, and then escaped basically uninjured.

Davis had one child, a daughter, Larrima Davis, born July 27, 1986.

Approaching trial, the district attorney's office had one witness outside of law enforcement: Roy L. Gray, who admitted under oath to steering "traffic to coke spots." Allegedly, on October 26, 1986, in Manhattan's Washington Heights section, Gray was robbed of $2, and four days later, October 30, in the borough's Harlem section, spotted the robber, later understood as Davis, about to rob some cocaine dealers, too.  Reportedly, Gray thus alerted the police, and then rode in the police car that chased the getaway car, carrying Davis and two other men, to the Bronx's Highbridge section, where, along Jerome Avenue, upon issuing three gunshots at the police, the three men evaded arrest by vanishing into an apartment building.

In any case, the police reported that Gray, as a robbery victim of Davis, examined photos and provided the "positive identification" of Davis, that Davis's fingerprints were in the getaway car, that two shell casings, recovered from the scene, matched the pistol on Davis at his December 6 arrest, and that ballistics tests tied this gun to the killings of four suspected drug dealers in Manhattan just hours before the October 30 car chase from Manhattan to the Bronx. Davis maintained, instead, that the police had framed him for these murders. Similarly, Davis's attorneys William Kunstler and Lynne Stewart as well as Davis's peers and family would altogether contend that five years before the shootout, certain police officers had recruited Davis, age 15, to deal drugs under their sponsorship, and thereupon tolerated, likewise, the dealing of Davis's peers soon working under him, but began harassing them and communicating death threats for Davis once he stopped dealing drugs in late 1986 while withholding drug proceeds, reputedly some $40 000.

On the evening of Wednesday, November 19, 1986, acting on a tip, an NYPD team of 27 from the 41st Precinct and the Emergency Service Unit, the ESU, converged on the six-story, Fulton Avenue apartment building where two of Davis's sisters had adjoining apartments on the ground floor. At about 8:30 p.m., 15 officers surrounded the building and 12 others entered; nine of these went to the three-room apartment of Davis's sister Regina Lewis and seven entered it. Inside were Davis, his girlfriend, his sister, her husband, and four children. Lewis's two infant children were asleep in the bedroom at the rear.

On the afternoon of December 5, 1986, police received another tip that Davis had been seen entering the Bronx housing project where his sister Margaret lived. They surrounded the 14-story building, closed off local streets and posted sharpshooters on nearby rooftops. After searching his sister's second-floor apartment, police began a systematic canvass of all 312 units. At some point during the day, Mr. Davis forced his way at gunpoint into Apartment 14-EB, where Elroy and Sophia Sewer lived with their two daughters, just as neighbor Theresa Ali, and her 2-year-old son, arrived for a visit. Mr. Sewer arrived home at 8 P.M. to find his family and the neighbors being held hostage by Mr. Davis. At 11:45 p.m. Davis released the two visitors and sent Mr. Sewer out to pick up food from a nearby Chinese restaurant. He also ordered Mr. Sewer to call Mr. Davis' mother's and sister's tapped telephones and give false location information. When the husband returned with the food he was stopped for questioning by the police and, at 12:45 a.m., informed them that his wife and two daughters were being held hostage by Mr. Davis.

Victor Lagombra, reputedly a "mid-level" crack dealer in Harlem, Manhattan, was murdered in September 1986.

Raymond Vizcaino, reputedly a drug dealer in the Bronx, was murdered in August 1986.

Davis's arrest record, starting in early 1983, involves a 1984 robbery conviction, which would premise a probation violation.  By the November 1986 shootout, a court hearing for it had been postponed four times. Soon after the successful manhunt, however, the Bronx District Attorney's office alleged that, as The New York Times then paraphrased, "Davis was part of a small, loosely organized, 'very violent' group of gunmen who have robbed, assaulted and slain drug dealers in the Bronx and northern Manhattan in recent months".

Rosado was already serving a sentence of 25 years to life for murder and assault charges in the early 1980s, and had been denied parole in 2007. He was arraigned at Shawangunk Town Court the next morning. DOCS officials said both he and Davis had long disciplinary records, including fights with other inmates, but there was no record of any previous violence between the two.

Larry Davis or, since 1989, Adam Abdul-Hakeem (May 28, 1966 – February 20, 2008) was a controversial American, convicted in 1991 of murdering a civilian, but best known for his 1986 shooting of six police officers and yet, in a unique feat, at trial in 1988, successfully arguing self-defense, achieving acquittal of attempt to murder the officers.