Background
Davis was sought as a suspect in seven murders: the execution-style killing of four drug dealers in a Bronx apartment, another during an apparent drug robbery in Manhattan, and two more. During the weeks before the raid, he knew he was wanted by the police and avoided his own apartment, spending time at his girlfriend's and at his two sisters' adjoining apartments on Fulton Avenue. At age 20, Davis had a record of arrests and convictions dating back to early 1983 and had violated his probation for a 1984 robbery.
Acting on a tip, in the evening of Wednesday November 19, 1986 a team of 27 officers and detectives from the Bronx 41st Precinct and the NYPD's elite Emergency Service Unit assembled in a parking lot. Wearing bulletproof vests and armed with shotguns and handguns, they went to the six-story Fulton Avenue building where two of Davis's sisters had adjoining apartments on the ground floor.
The police later said the raid was an attempt to question Davis. Although a "positive identification" of Davis had been made in a car chase 20 days earlier in which shots were fired at the police, he had not been named as a suspect in any crime, and no arrest warrant was issued until after the raid and shootout. A senior police official said that no charges had been brought beforehand because "once you move to introduce an accusatory instrument you lose the benefit of being able to talk to that person." A lawyer for Davis said the raid was staged to kill him to suppress his knowledge of police involvement in drug sales.
Read more about this topic: Larry Davis (criminal)
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