The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office on Thursday afternoon made public body-camera video recordings involving the fatal Paterson police shooting of 31-year-old violence intervention specialist Najee Seabrooks.
Before releasing the footage to the press, state authorities showed the videos on Thursday morning to Seabrooks’ family and people who were close to him and provided a separate preview of the recordings to pastors at Calvary Baptist Church in Paterson.
The release covered almost 90 minutes of footage from seven officers’ body cameras. Officials said they redacted portions of the videos. The incident went on for almost five hours and involved numerous Paterson police officers.
Authorities on Thursday also made public recordings of seven 911 calls, including some made by Seabrooks himself.
In releasing the documents, the Attorney General’s Office provided an extensive official account of what authorities say happened.
The first officers on the scene encountered Seabrooks’ family members, the Attorney General’s Office said.
They reportedly informed the officers Seabrooks was hallucinating and behaving erratically. At the family’s request, the officers called an ambulance.
The family then took the officers to an apartment, where they spoke with Seabrooks, who had locked himself inside a bathroom in an apartment, state officials said.
Seabrooks reportedly told the officers, “People are trying to kill me. I need an escort.”
Based on information from the family, the officers concluded there was no threat to Seabrooks, officials said. The family said he may have been experiencing a bad reaction to something he had smoked and that his actions were completely out of character.
The family members told the police that they believed he had arrived at the apartment around 2 a.m., and in the morning grabbed some knives and locked himself inside the bathroom, according to the Attorney General’s Office.
After the police Emergency Response Team and Fire Department paramedics arrived, Seabrooks told the police that he had two knives and a gun he referred to as a “pocket rocket,” state officials said. The police and family members pleaded with Seabrooks to unlock the door and come out of the bathroom so they could get him help.
Seabrooks then asked for a police sergeant to be called to the scene, officials said. The sergeant told Seabrooks to come out of the bathroom, explaining that he was not in any trouble and would be taken to the hospital to be evaluated. During this time, Seabrooks repeated that he had a gun, authorities said.
At about 9:40 a.m., a trained negotiator from the Paterson Police Department arrived at the scene, officials said. For about an hour and 30 minutes, two police sergeants, EMS workers, family members and trained negotiators spoke to Seabrooks in an attempt to get him to come out from inside the bathroom.
A family member was brought to the apartment to speak to Seabrooks in an attempt to persuade him to come out of the bathroom, according to the Attorney General’s Office. At points, Seabrooks would briefly open the door.
Officers explained to him that his work “mentor” could not come into the apartment due to safety concerns, because Seabrooks had knives and claimed to have a gun, officials said.
At about 10:15 a.m. a loud crash was heard from inside the bathroom and water began flooding the apartment, officials said. Seabrooks was cutting himself with the knives and was bleeding, according to the Attorney General’s Office.
At 10:26 a.m., when officers had not heard from Seabrooks for a while, they attempted to break into the bathroom but were unable to do so, as the door appeared to be barricaded, officials said.
While they were speaking with Seabrooks, officers observed knives in his hands, and Seabrooks told the officers he had a fully loaded gun and threatened to shoot people, according to the Attorney General’s Office.
Seabrooks threw various items at the police and started a fire in the bathroom, officials said. He threw an unknown liquid in the face of one of the officers, who was taken to the hospital, treated and later released.
During this time, Seabrooks vacillated from expressing a willingness to cooperate with the police, and accept the help being offered, to saying he was going to die in the bathroom and take one of the officers with him, according to the Attorney General’s Office.
At various times during the encounter, officers deployed about 15 less-than-lethal sponge-tipped projectiles, some of which struck Seabrooks, but they were not effective in subduing him.
At about 12:35 p.m., Seabrooks came out of the bathroom and lunged toward the officers with a knife in his hand, officials said. Seabrooks fell to the ground, and officers removed the knife from his hand.
Clergy members who viewed the recordings in Paterson declined to speak to a news reporter about what they had seen.
Seabrooks’ family and friends, social justice activists, community leaders, local elected officials and law enforcement supporters have been calling for state authorities to release the videos since almost immediately after the Paterson man was shot on March 3 at the end of a 4½-hour encounter with city police at his apartment on Mill Street near the Great Falls.
Seabrooks’ death sparked public outrage and protest rallies, including several near-miss confrontations between protesters and police. Passions were fueled by assertions from Seabrooks’ co-workers at the Paterson Healing Collective violence intervention group that he contacted them and asked them to intervene during the prolonged standoff.
But Healing Collective members said police at the apartment building refused to let them see their friend during his crisis.
Five days after the shooting, the Attorney General’s Office said Paterson police officers were responding at 7:42 a.m. “to a 911 call of an individual in distress” when they encountered Seabrooks.
An hour later, the Paterson Police Department’s Crisis Negotiation Team and the Emergency Response Team (ERT) arrived at the scene, state officials said. Three officers — Hector Mendez, Qiao Lin and Mario Vdovjak — used “less lethal force” on Seabrooks, the Attorney General’s Office said.
At about 12:35 p.m., two officers on the ERT — Anzore Tsay and Jose Hernandez — fired their guns, striking Seabrooks, who was taken to St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson, where he was pronounced dead at 12:51 p.m., state authorities said.
The city has placed those officers on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the attorney general’s investigation, officials said.
Seabrooks became one of the Paterson Healing Collective’s clients in March 2021 when he was one of five victims in a non-fatal shooting on Carroll Street in Paterson’s troubled 4th Ward. Like other shooting victims, Seabrooks started participating in community events run by the Healing Collective and eventually joined the organization as an employee.
On the Monday before he was killed, Seabrooks was part of a Healing Collective team that traversed the sidewalks at dismissal time outside Paterson’s Eastside High School on the first day of classes after a student there was fatally stabbed outside the building.
His Healing Collective friends said Seabrooks attended a Paterson Police Department promotion ceremony on Feb. 23 in the same City Hall meeting room where two weeks later people would be demanding answers about his death. On Feb. 2, Seabrooks was among 18 young men and women celebrated by the Healing Collective for graduating from a leadership academy training program.
Formed in 2020, the Paterson Healing Collective works in partnership with St. Joseph’s hospital in an effort to curtail street violence by providing shooting victims with services and steering them away from retaliation. In January, federal and state officials announced that the Healing Collective would be getting two new $1 million grants to continue its work.
In 2021, Seabrooks was interviewed in a video by two NorthJersey.com photojournalists working on a project about the Healing Collective. He talked about getting into trouble in his early teens and being placed on probation before he righted himself, playing basketball and being part of a state championship team while he attended an alternative high school in Paterson. Seabrooks talked about how playing college basketball in California changed his life.
In that interview, Seabrooks expressed displeasure about his interactions with Paterson police detectives after he was shot in 2021. He said investigators were asking him questions about the crime while he was still bleeding from an open wound. Seabrooks said he filed an Internal Affairs complaint about the police conduct but never heard from anyone about his accusations against the cops.
Seabrooks told the photojournalists about his hopes for improving programs for Paterson’s children.
“It’d show kids you can have a good time coming outside without having to run and duck every time or go to a corner store,” Seabrooks said. “Everybody got to be supervised, I would say. So let’s make it back into a good neighborhood, positive vibes, and everybody look out for one another sometimes, stuff like that, just try to bring back some love and energy into the story.”