Police identified the killer as Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who wrote online that he planned to avenge the deaths of Garner and Brown, who were both unarmed black men killed by white officers. Brinsley killed himself with a shot to the head soon after.
“Let’s comfort these families, let’s see them through these funerals,” de Blasio said in his speech, hours after visiting the officers’ grieving families with Bill Bratton, the police commissioner. “Then debate can begin again.”
But the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist representing the families of Garner and Brown, said de Blasio’s call was too nebulous to heed.
“Is a vigil a protest? Is a rally?” Sharpton said in a telephone interview, calling de Blasio’s comments “an ill-defined request.”
Sharpton, who joined Garner’s relatives over the weekend to denounce the slaying of the officers, said he would not change planned prayer vigils at the scene of Garner’s death and elsewhere over the coming days to mark the family’s first Christmas without him.