Police Officer in Shooting Straddles Two Worlds
By MICHAEL BRICK
Published: January 26, 2004
In the Louis Armstrong Houses in Brooklyn, where a police officer shot and killed a teenager early Saturday morning, lives are jumbled together. Extended families share apartments, nicknames are familiar and people traverse smoothly from one building to the next and back again by way of the rooftop.
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That is not how life is where the officer who fired the fatal shot, Richard S. Neri Jr., calls home.
Officer Neri, who was placed on modified duty and forced to turn in his gun and badge, lives in Wantagh, on the South Shore of Long Island, about 27 miles from the housing project he patrolled in Brooklyn.
With his wife, Felicia, Officer Neri owns a 43-year-old ranch house with cream-colored aluminum siding, a few shrubs and a white plastic fence. That part of Wantagh, where the median household income is about $72,000, is built around keeping people separated. Obstacles to an easy flow of neighborly life are evident: few of the sidewalks are shoveled.
The house is on a four-lane thoroughfare, where the patches of homes seem to divide strip malls rather than the other way around. The stamp of the suburbs is evident in a jogging path that gives runners a view of little more than roadway for miles.