Victim was trying to break into Kalicharan’s car.
By Raif Karerat
In a rare decision — the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades — the FBI has decided to fire an agent for intentionally shooting a suspect.
The bureau concluded the Indian American agent was in violation of bureau policy when he wounded an unarmed man who had apparently helped break into his Lexus outside his home in Queens, New York City.
Federal Agent Navin Kalicharan was off duty when he fired at the civilian from a second-story window, hitting him in the back, reported the New York Times.
Under the FBI’s lethal force protocol, agents may fire their weapons only if there is an imminent risk of death or serious bodily injury.
A 12-member “shooting incident review group” that examined Kalicharan’s case deduced there was insufficient evidence to believe that a man “involved in a minor property crime out on the street” posed any immediate danger to people indoors and upstairs.
According to The Times, the panel unanimously concluded that Kalicharan had violated the lethal force policy. The panel added that it appeared Kalicharan was not worried about his own safety or that of his neighbors, but instead “was concerned about his car.”
Kalicharan, then 35, told the FBI investigators that the man he fired at, a Jamaican immigrant named Adrian Ricketts, was standing at the trunk of the car and reaching toward his waistband as though he had a gun.
Investigators, however, found no evidence that Ricketts, then 23, was armed.
The bullet entered the right side of Ricketts’s back and became lodged too close to his spine for doctors to remove it, although a Justice Department report said he had suffered no significant lasting adverse consequences.
In October 2013, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division decided not to recommend charging Kalicharan with willfully using excessive force. However, the Civil Rights Division report did state that the agent’s decision to shoot was “difficult to understand.”
Meanwhile, Kalicharan’s lawyer, Lawrence Berger, told The New York Times that his client would be vindicated after a hearing to appeal the decision to dismiss him.
“We are vigorously defending his tenure, and we are vigorously defending the shoot,” Berger said. “It was an eminently ‘good shoot,’ based on a perception of an overt threat of serious bodily injury to my client.”