Recently released NYPD drone and body-worn camera footage is providing new details about the dramatic, fatal confrontation between a Bronx man and Emergency Services Unit cops who spent an hour high up on the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge pleading with him to come down before the man raised a knife against the officers and was shot.
The footage shows Detective Nicholas Giordani climb up to Chaun Bottom, dressed in a sleeveless black hoodie, standing on a cable above the East River about 3:40 a.m. on Sept. 4.
The detective introduces himself to Bottom, 41, telling him he won’t come any closer and asking him, “What’s going on, man? What brought you up here?”
“Listen, my name is Nick,” Giordani says in the video, which was released late Friday. “ I’m not going to come any further, alright? Look at me. I’ll stay right here. You stay right there.”
“I don’t want to see you up here. I understand the view is nice, but there’s no reason to be up here right now,” he continued.
Giordani’s efforts to strike up a conversation with Bottom prove unsuccessful, as the Bronx resident remains quiet throughout much of the encounter.
“I know you don’t know me, okay, but I am now a part of your life. Everything that brought you to this moment led me to you and you to me. We are no longer strangers,” the detective said. “And I care about you…What happened? What’s going on today, or what’s been going on in the last couple weeks of your life that makes you think this is where you need to be?”
Although indecipherable in the footage, Bottom seemed to tell Giordani, “There’s nothing left,” as the detective at one point tells him, “There is stuff left; you have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t say there’s nothing left. Yes, there is. I promise you there’s plenty ahead of you.”
About ten minutes into the standoff, the detective notices Bottom holding something in his hand.
“What do you got there? What is that, man? What do you got?” the detective asks.
Giordani pleads with Bottom to drop the object and promises not to get any closer to him, saying, “I need you to drop what’s in your hand.”
Forty minutes later, Bottom began moving toward the detective with the multi-tool knife raised in his left hand, before he turned around and ascended the suspension cable away from Giordani.
Bottom descends again five minutes later, this time revealing the object in his hand as a knife as he holds it out toward the detective and approaches him.
Footage from a drone hovering nearby shows Bottom raising the knife within reach of one of the officers. It’s then that Sgt. Dennis Dooley, who was standing on the roadbed below, fires one shot, striking Bottom.
Officers brought Bottom down and began rendering aid before medics arrived and rushed him to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Cops recovered his knife, a Leatherman multi-tool, and a flashlight that he dropped, officials said.
Assistant Chief Gerard Dowling, the commanding officer of ESU, previously told reporters at a press conference that Bottom told officers, “I want to die. I want you to kill me. I have a bomb. You’re not going to make me do something bad to the cops.”
The bomb Bottom mentioned was never found.
The armed man, who lived in Parkchester, was described by his next-door neighbor as a quiet guy who kept to himself.
“That’s crazy. I wouldn’t even imagine that,” Nicole, 30, said of his killing. “I don’t have a relationship with him, but because I live right here, it’s really sad. I feel really bad.”
The September 4 shooting came days after the police shot and killed a mentally ill woman wielding two knives in Times Square after she had stabbed two people, killing one.
On Aug. 31, the emotionally disturbed woman, identified as 49-year-old Pamela Cisneros, stabbed a 68-year-old Rhode Island man in the stomach near W. 41st St. and Seventh Ave. around 4:20 p.m., before fatally knifing 32-year-old Erin Piacenti, a mother of a 5-month-old baby girl who had just returned to her job as a vice president at Bank of America.
Cops quickly found Cisneros holding two kitchen knives and surrounded her. Officers Tased and then fatally shot Cisneros as she advanced on them, swinging a knife in each hand, cops said.