Dinkins Urges Calm After Officer Is Cleared in Death Tied to Unrest

NEW YORK — Mayor David N. Dinkins called for calm Thursday after a grand jury cleared a police officer of wrongdoing in the July killing of a suspected drug seller that sparked violence in a largely Latino section of the city.

Rain and a heavy police presence in the Washington Heights neighborhood of northern Manhattan helped keep the peace in the hours after the grand jury decision was unsealed.

There were eight arrests in one demonstration Thursday night, but that protest dwindled.

A second grand jury cleared a police lieutenant in a death that occurred during the violence after the killing of Jose Garcia.

The panels finished their work last week. Newspaper reports said the findings were kept secret for several days so city officials could take steps to maintain peace, but Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert M. Morgenthau denied that there was any reason for the delay.

Unreliable witnesses were among the reasons for the grand jury decision, Morgenthau said.

Officer Michael O’Keefe, 29, will not face criminal charges in the July 3 slaying of Garcia, a 23-year-old Dominican immigrant.

Morgenthau said that one witness against O’Keefe had been evicted from her home after letting a relative deal drugs from the apartment, and that Garcia allegedly worked for her son as a lookout. The woman and a sister said O’Keefe battered Garcia unconscious, then shot him.

Police radio transmissions just before the shooting indicated that O’Keefe was “desperate and frightened,” Morgenthau said, “not one engaged in an unprovoked assault and about to shoot an unconscious man.”

Garcia’s slaying ignited three days of sporadic disturbances and another three days of more intense violence, with police reporting 139 arrests, one death and 90 injuries. Fourteen buildings and 121 vehicles were set afire.