Profile: NYPD Killer Was Disturbed, Apolitical, Suicidal

Ben Yakas

Published Jan 4, 2015

Modified Jan 4, 2015

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Ben Yakas

Published Jan 4, 2015

Modified Jan 4, 2015

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This weekend, the Times has an all-encompassing profile of Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the 28-year-old man who killed two NYPD officers in their squad car in Brooklyn on December 20th. And it paints a picture of a suicidal, apolitical, disturbed young man who drifted through a violent life until it came to a violent end.

The Times traces his life from his Brooklyn roots ("Mr. Brinsley was born in Brooklyn, and he never let you forget it, calling people out for acting Brooklyn when he felt that they weren’t") through his many various wanderings around the country (he was essentially homeless for his adult life, moving from friends' couches to girlfriends' apartments) and his embrace of social media. Mostly, his life comes across as a series of disappointments:

He was the difficult teenager who was passed around from home to home, the adult who could make nothing work, not a T-shirt company, not even an attempt on his own life at a former girlfriend’s house.

Everyone seemed to betray him. The friends who pistol-whipped and robbed him in May. The girlfriend who dumped him around Thanksgiving.

In recent weeks, Mr. Brinsley was unraveling, increasingly desperate, the gap between the life he wanted at age 28 and the life he had looming ever larger. If he couldn’t get it together, he told the mother of his second child in early December, he would kill himself.

Importantly, they point out the false narrative of Brinsley's politics: while several outlets jumped to portray him as a political activist seeking revenge on the NYPD for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, due in large part to a few Instagram photos, the Times concludes he was mentally unstable and without any passion or real interest in the police or politics.

But the truth of Mr. Brinsley’s short life and violent end is probably less political and more accidental than initially portrayed, friends and his mother said. He was no ardent anti-police activist, as some of his friends were. He was nursing no grudge against the police in Brooklyn. He was no stone-cold criminal; his 20 arrests were mostly for minor crimes, even though they prevented him again and again from getting a job.

He struggled with depression but had no history of hallucinations or other forms of psychosis, unlike his oldest brother, who battled schizophrenia. His version of Islam seemed more jumbled than jihadi. Instead, Mr. Brinsley seemed to be a grandstander at the end of his tether, homeless, jobless and hopeless.

In the weeks before his death, Brinsley threatened suicide to an ex-girlfriend, and seemed preoccupied according to friends. Nevertheless, he "did not talk about hurting police officers or visiting his ex-girlfriend, said his friend known as Mike Summerz on Instagram. 'I knew he had a lot on his mind,' the friend added."

Read the full profile here.

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