In front of a throng of fellow students crowding out of the bar, Henry was shot at by two officers, including a Mount Pleasant officer standing in front of his sedan. A Pleasantville police officer who was hit by Henry’s car and was clinging to the hood is believed to have fired the fatal shot.
Two officers suffered minor injuries, and Henry’s front-seat passenger suffered a minor gunshot wound. All three were treated at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla and released. “It’s horrendous , it’s something that I would hope would never have happened here, but unfortunately it did, and we’ll proceed with a very, very thorough investigation,” Mount Pleasant Police Chief Louis Alagno said Sunday morning at a news conference.
Mount Pleasant police are leading the investigation along with the state police. The Westchester County Police Crime Scene Unit and the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office are assisting.
Friends who were with Henry before the shooting said he was the “designated driver” that night and was sober. He had been hanging out at the bar after attending two previous townhouse gatherings on campus.
“He was with me the whole night and wasn’t even drinking,” said Christine Leone, a Pace junior. “I kept trying to get him to take a sip of my drink and he kept saying, ‘No, I’m driving.’ His friend from home (Cox) wouldn’t drink either.”
“I had just said goodbye to DJ two minutes before it happened,” said Leone. When she walked out of the bar, she saw a cop knocking on Henry’s car window. She figured Henry drove off because he knew he was stopped illegally in the fire lane. Alagno would not release several details of the incident, including how many shots were fired. The police chief also would not say whether he thought the use of deadly force had been justified. It was the second deadly police shooting in a week involving a Westchester police officer; five days ago, a Pelham Manor officer shot and killed a Harlem man after a chase and scuffle.
The student’s father, Danroy Henry Sr., told The Enterprise of Brockton, Mass., on Sunday that he was shocked such an incident could happen. He had just watched his son play in the homecoming game Saturday.
“I’m sure if you reach out to the people investigating it, they will give you their version of the story,” he said. “There are a lot of witnesses who say that that’s not the version, so we need to get to the bottom of it.” Several Mount Pleasant town and Pleasantville village police officers responded about 1:20 a.m. Sunday to a large disturbance at Finnegan’s Grill, on the corner of the shopping center, a short drive from Pace’s Pleasantville campus.
More than 150 people, most of them Pace students, had gathered in front of the bar and in the parking lot, with sporadic fights breaking out even after police arrived, Alagno said. Police approached Henry’s vehicle, which was parked in a fire lane. When Mount Pleasant officer Ronald Gagnon knocked on the car window, Henry sped off, according to a Mount Pleasant news release. Hess tried stopping the vehicle, but Henry accelerated into him, hitting him, and the officer ended up on the hood of the car, police said.
As the vehicle passed by, Mount Pleasant officer Carl Castagna attempted to pull Hess off the hood, but was grazed by the car. The police chief said today that further investigations suggested that he may have been struck before Hess approached the vehicle. While clinging to the hood as the car continued to accelerate, Hess shot at Henry, the release said, apparently through the windshield. The vehicle kept heading down the fire lane, moving directly toward officer Beckley, who also fired at the vehicle, which crashed into a Mount Pleasant police cruiser and came to a stop about 60 feet from where it started. Alagno said investigators believe Hess fired the fatal shot.
