Eleanor Bumpurs was sixty-six years old, naked, mentally ill, and holding a kitchen knife in her own living room when an NYPD Emergency Service Unit officer shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. It was October 29, 1984. The police had come to evict her from her apartment at 1551 University Avenue in the Sedgwick Houses, a public housing complex in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx. She owed the city rent. She had arthritis. She had told a housing authority manager that 'people had come through the windows, the walls and the floors and had ripped her off.' She blamed Reagan. What happened next would reshape how New York City police officers are trained to deal with people in mental health crises.
Bumpurs had been unraveling. She told her daughter Mary that someone in the building was harassing her. Mary told her to keep the door locked. When housing authority officials came about unpaid rent, Bumpurs refused to let them in. She told them she would not pay because of maintenance problems, but when workers were finally admitted on October 12, they found the hallway light and stove functioning normally. What they also found were cans of human feces in the bathtub. The signs of a woman losing her grip on reality were unmistakable, but the city's response machinery was calibrated for noncompliance, not illness. On the morning of October 29, housing workers returned to carry out the eviction. Bumpurs warned them she would throw boiling lye at the next person who appeared.
The NYPD Emergency Service Unit was summoned -- a team specially trained in subduing emotionally disturbed people. They could not get Bumpurs to come to the door. Officers drilled out the lock and through the hole saw a naked sixty-six-year-old woman holding a ten-inch kitchen knife. They knocked the door down, entered, and attempted to restrain her with plastic shields and a Y-shaped bar designed for such situations. Bumpurs fought free. Officer Stephen Sullivan fired his 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. The first blast struck her hand. The second -- all nine pellets -- struck her chest and killed her. The emergency room physician who treated her would later testify that the first shot left her hand 'a bloody stump.' Defense witnesses argued she could still have wielded the knife even after that wound. The question of whether two shotgun blasts were necessary to stop a sixty-six-year-old woman with a kitchen knife would define the case and haunt the city.
A grand jury indicted Officer Sullivan on charges of second-degree manslaughter in January 1985. A judge dismissed the indictment that April, ruling the evidence insufficient and Sullivan's actions consistent with Emergency Service Unit procedures. A new indictment followed. Sullivan waived his right to a jury trial, opting for a bench trial before a judge. The proceedings opened on January 12, 1987, more than two years after Bumpurs's death. Fellow officers testified she still posed a threat after the first blast. Two plastic surgeons agreed. The emergency room doctor did not. On February 26, 1987, Judge Fred W. Eggert acquitted Sullivan. Federal prosecutors declined to investigate. Rudy Giuliani, then the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, stated he had found 'nothing indicating that the case was not tried fully, fairly and competently.' The Bumpurs family sued the city for $10 million and settled for $200,000.
Bumpurs's killing, alongside other deaths that inflamed racial tensions in 1980s New York, forced institutional change. The city and state developed a mandatory training program for police encounters with 'Emotionally Disturbed People' -- a collaboration between the NYPD, New York State Police, and the Department of Mental Health. Officers already in service were required to complete the course alongside academy cadets. The program represented an acknowledgment that treating mental illness as a law enforcement problem -- sending armed officers to evict a woman whose delusions were visible to anyone paying attention -- produced predictable tragedies. Lou Reed referenced Bumpurs in his 1989 song 'Hold On,' alongside Michael Stewart, another victim of NYPD violence. Spike Lee dedicated Do the Right Thing to the families of Bumpurs and others. Audre Lorde wrote a poem titled 'For the Record' in her memory. Eleanor Bumpurs had arthritis, lived in public housing, could not pay her rent, and was losing her mind. The city sent men with a shotgun.
Located at 40.848N, 73.919W in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, at the Sedgwick Houses public housing complex on University Avenue. Visible from altitude as part of the dense residential area west of the Grand Concourse. Nearby airports: La Guardia (KLGA) 7 nm southeast, Teterboro (KTEB) 8 nm southwest.