Bodycam: Officers Shoot Teen Armed With Scissors While In A Scuffle With Family

The 911 Call That Ended in Gunfire

At first, there was nothing about the emergency call that suggested it would end with gunfire.

It began inside a family home in Ozone Park, Queens, on the afternoon of March 27, 2024.

A young man was in distress.

His family was there.

And someone called 911.

What happened during the next few minutes would eventually become the subject of a police shooting investigation, the public release of body-worn camera footage, a disciplinary case involving two NYPD officers, and a federal lawsuit brought by the young man's family.

The young man was 19-year-old Win Rozario.

According to the later investigation by the New York Attorney General's Office, Rozario himself had made the 911 call. When police arrived, his younger brother told them that Win was having an "episode."

The officers went upstairs.

They entered the apartment.

And then, in a matter of moments, the situation changed completely.

A pair of scissors appeared.

A Taser was fired.

Family members became physically involved in the struggle.

Then came the first gunshot.

And then another.

And another.

The entire confrontation—from the moment Rozario took the scissors from a kitchen drawer until he fell to the floor—lasted roughly a minute and a half, according to the Attorney General's later investigation.

Five shots were fired.

Five bullets struck Rozario.

He would not survive.

But the most important question surrounding the incident would not simply be what happened.

It would be why the encounter escalated so quickly—and whether it could have ended differently.

The bodycam footage provides a remarkable window into those final moments.

And once you watch the footage, the sequence becomes much harder to understand as a simple headline.

Because this was not a confrontation that began with officers chasing a violent suspect through the streets.

It began with a call for help inside a family home.

A Young Man Calls for Help

The first detail that changes the way this story is understood is who made the emergency call.

Early news reports described the incident as a response to a family member's concern about Rozario.

But the later investigation by the New York Attorney General's Office established that Rozario himself placed the 911 call.

According to the investigation, the call came at approximately 1:49 p.m.

Police were dispatched to the family's Ozone Park home after the caller was described as being "on drugs" and acting erratically.

That description would become important later.

At the time, however, the officers arriving at the home had only limited information.

They did not know exactly what they were walking into.

They did not know what Rozario was thinking.

And they did not know that within minutes they would be forced to make a decision that would end his life.

When officers arrived, they encountered Rozario's younger brother.

The teenager told them his brother was having an "episode."

The officers asked questions about what was happening.

Then they went upstairs.

That decision would place them only seconds away from the moment everything changed.

The Door Opens

The bodycam footage is especially striking because of how ordinary the beginning appears.

There is no dramatic police chase.

No flashing lights racing through traffic.

No barricaded suspect surrounded by dozens of officers.

Instead, the footage shows officers moving through a residential setting and speaking with the family.

The situation appears tense, but still manageable.

Inside the second-floor apartment, officers encountered Win Rozario and his mother.

For a brief moment, the scene remained contained.

Then Rozario walked into the kitchen.

He opened a drawer.

And he took out a pair of scissors.

That single action transformed the encounter.

According to the Attorney General's report, Rozario advanced toward the officers while holding the scissors, while his mother attempted to restrain him.

The officers began backing away.

One officer deployed a Taser.

For a moment, it appeared the electrical weapon might stop the confrontation.

But the situation was not over.

Rozario's mother pushed him toward the floor and took the scissors from his hand.

That should have been the end of the immediate threat.

But it wasn't.

Because now the family was physically entangled in the middle of the confrontation.

And the officers were still trying to control what was happening.

"Don't Shoot"

This is one of the moments that makes the footage so difficult to watch.

Rozario's mother was still close to her son.

The scissors had been taken away from him.

The officers ordered her to move.

She eventually placed the scissors down on a kitchen chair.

For a brief moment, the weapon was no longer in Rozario's hands.

But the situation remained unstable.

The officers continued ordering his mother to get away from him.

She moved several feet away.

And then she said:

"Don't shoot."

Those words would later become one of the most remembered moments from the released footage.

Because seconds later, the situation changed again.

One of the officers fired a second Taser.

And this time, the electrical weapon did not end the confrontation.

According to the Attorney General's investigation, Rozario removed one of the Taser prongs from his shoulder.

Then he picked up the scissors again.

And he began moving toward the officers.

That was the moment the encounter entered its final and most dangerous phase.

The First Gunshot

The bodycam footage captures the rapid transition from less-lethal force to gunfire.

One officer had a Taser.

The other had a firearm.

Rozario was holding the scissors.

His mother was still nearby.

His younger brother was also in the apartment.

There was almost no room for error.

According to the Attorney General's report, Rozario continued advancing toward the first officer.

The second officer, positioned to the officer's left, fired his gun.

The bullet struck Rozario.

But that still did not immediately end the encounter.

Rozario was pushed back toward the kitchen by his mother and brother.

A struggle followed.

His mother attempted to take the scissors away.

His younger brother tried to move his mother out of the way.

The family members fell to the floor.

And during that chaotic struggle, Rozario again picked up the scissors.

Police shouted for him to put them down.

He took another step forward.

Then came another gunshot.

Five Shots

What happened next unfolded in only seconds.

The officers continued ordering Rozario to put the scissors down.

He remained standing.

He was still holding the scissors.

Another shot was fired.

Then another.

And then another.

According to the Attorney General's Office, the officers fired five shots in total, striking Rozario five times.

The shooting occurred over a very short period.

The entire confrontation—from the moment Rozario pulled the scissors from the kitchen drawer to the moment he fell—lasted approximately a minute and a half.

Eventually, Rozario collapsed.

The officers handcuffed him.

One officer began performing chest compressions while another called for an ambulance.

Rozario was transported to a hospital.

He was pronounced dead.

He was 19 years old.

The Footage Changes the Story

For weeks after the shooting, the public had only fragments of information.

Police described a dangerous confrontation.

The family questioned the officers' actions.

Then, on May 3, 2024, New York Attorney General Letitia James released body-worn camera footage as part of the state's investigation.

Suddenly, the public could see much more of what had happened inside the apartment.

The footage showed Rozario holding scissors.

It showed officers using Tasers.

It showed his mother attempting to restrain him.

It showed the family caught in the middle of the struggle.

And it showed the final gunfire.

The Attorney General's Office emphasized that the release of the footage was not itself a determination of criminal guilt or innocence.

The videos were released as part of the Office of Special Investigation's examination of the death.

News organizations reviewing the footage described the scene as chaotic and extremely fast-moving.

The Associated Press reported that Rozario's mother and younger brother could be heard pleading with police during the encounter.

CBS New York likewise reported that the footage showed Rozario initially moving toward officers with scissors, being Tased, having the scissors taken away by his mother, and later picking them up again.

But seeing the footage did not end the debate.

In many ways, it began a much larger one.

Two Versions of What the Video Means

The facts visible on the bodycam became the foundation for two very different interpretations.

Police officials argued that the officers were confronted with a person holding a sharp object who continued moving toward them despite repeated commands.

NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell defended the officers shortly after the shooting, describing the incident as chaotic and dangerous and saying the officers had to defend themselves.

Rozario's family saw the same footage differently.

His relatives argued that police escalated the situation and that officers should have handled the encounter differently.

They questioned why the situation moved from a mental-health-related 911 call to Tasers and then gunfire in such a short period.

The family's position was later repeated by advocacy organizations supporting them.

It is important, however, to distinguish those arguments from the findings of investigators.

The Attorney General's Office ultimately conducted a much broader investigation than the initial news reports.

It reviewed bodycam recordings, ballistics evidence, crime-scene evidence, 911 recordings, police radio transmissions, interviews, and medical evidence.

And in December 2025, the Attorney General's Office released its final report.

That report added another major chapter to the story.

What the Attorney General's Investigation Found

The December 2025 report did not conclude that the officers should face criminal charges.

Instead, the Office of Special Investigation said a prosecutor would not be able to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers' use of deadly physical force was justified under New York law.

The report noted that New York law permits an officer to use deadly physical force when the officer reasonably believes it is necessary to defend against deadly physical force.

The report also explained that a sharp object such as scissors can qualify as deadly physical force under the law.

In the investigators' account, Rozario advanced toward the officers with the scissors and did not comply with repeated commands to put them down.

Because of that evidence, OSI determined that criminal charges against the officers would not be pursued.

That was not the end of the matter.

Far from it.

Because while the state investigation did not pursue criminal charges, another process was examining whether the officers violated NYPD rules.

And that investigation produced a different result.

The Second Investigation

The Civilian Complaint Review Board, or CCRB, is an independent New York City agency that investigates allegations of misconduct involving NYPD officers.

The Attorney General's 2025 report specifically noted that the CCRB was handling the disciplinary side of the case.

In September 2025, the CCRB substantiated misconduct allegations against Officers Salvatore Alongi and Matthew Cianfrocco.

According to reporting on the CCRB's decision, the board found allegations involving excessive force and abuse of authority to be substantiated.

The board's findings differed from the conclusions reached by the investigators who initially reviewed the complaints.

The matter was then referred into the NYPD disciplinary process.

That distinction is crucial.

The Attorney General's Office was addressing whether criminal charges could be supported beyond a reasonable doubt.

The CCRB process was addressing departmental misconduct.

Those are different legal questions.

So the story did not end with a simple declaration that one side was right and the other side was wrong.

Instead, the case developed into two parallel tracks:

One involving criminal justification.

Another involving police discipline.

And then came a third.

The Family Takes the Case to Federal Court

In June 2025, members of Win Rozario's family filed a federal lawsuit against the City of New York and the officers involved.

The lawsuit alleges violations of constitutional and state-law rights connected to the shooting and the treatment of the family afterward.

The defendants' positions and the family's allegations remain matters for the litigation process to address; the filing itself is not a judicial finding that the allegations are true.

The case continued into 2026.

A March 2026 federal court filing identified the matter as Rozario et al. v. City of New York et al., and a protective order was entered in connection with the litigation.

That means the story of what happened inside that Queens apartment has continued far beyond the day the bodycam footage was recorded.

The Question Behind the Question

But there is another part of this story that is easy to overlook.

It is not simply a question about whether a teenager was holding scissors.

It is a question about what happens when police are called to a home because someone is experiencing a mental-health or behavioral crisis.

The Attorney General's final report examined that issue in detail.

Investigators reviewed NYPD crisis-intervention training and New York City's mental-health response programs.

They found significant limitations.

The report said that NYPD crisis-intervention materials did not provide officers with specific information about available mental-health services or detailed protocols for calling on those services.

It also examined the city's B-HEARD program, which uses teams involving paramedics and mental-health professionals to respond to certain behavioral-health emergencies.

B-HEARD was not available in Rozario's precinct at the time.

And according to the Attorney General's report, the particular 911 description that Rozario was "on drugs" would have made the call ineligible for a B-HEARD response under the program's rules at that time.

The report also said that other mental-health response resources were either unavailable or would not have applied to the situation.

This became one of the most important findings of the entire investigation.

Because the report did not simply look backward at the shooting.

It asked what could be changed so that future emergencies might be handled differently.

A Recommendation Born From a Tragedy

The Attorney General's Office recommended expanding B-HEARD so that it could operate across all precincts and at all times.

It also recommended expanding the types of situations in which mental-health professionals could respond, including crises involving drugs or alcohol.

Another recommendation was to allow appropriate co-response between mental-health professionals and police once officers had determined that a scene was safe.

The report also recommended additional training for NYPD officers so they would know how to request such assistance and what information to provide to mental-health responders.

And the Attorney General recommended legislative action to create a broader public-health-based crisis response system.

These recommendations do not erase what happened to Win Rozario.

But they show that the investigation eventually expanded beyond the question of the five shots.

It became a question about the system that existed before the officers ever reached the front door.

The Family Left With a Different Kind of Silence

For Win Rozario's family, the aftermath did not end when the ambulance left.

His mother and younger brother had been inside the apartment.

They had watched the confrontation unfold.

They had watched police use Tasers.

They had witnessed the gunfire.

And they lost a son and brother in the place where they were supposed to feel safest.

Family members later spoke publicly about the emotional impact of the bodycam footage and their belief that the encounter should have been handled differently.

Advocacy groups supporting the family have also emphasized that Rozario had called 911 himself.

That detail has remained central to the family's account of the tragedy.

To them, the case represents a painful contradiction:

A young person reached out for help.

Police responded.

And the person who made the call ended up dead.

But There Is Another Detail the Footage Forces You to Consider

The bodycam footage does not show a simple scene.

It shows a family physically caught between a young man and armed police officers.

It shows the mother attempting to intervene.

It shows the younger brother trying to protect his mother.

It shows officers attempting to control the scene.

It shows Tasers being deployed.

And it shows Rozario repeatedly holding the scissors during the final moments.

That is why the video can be so difficult to reduce to a single sentence.

The footage contains evidence that supporters of the officers point to.

It also contains moments that critics of the police response have focused on.

The Attorney General's investigation ultimately concluded that the criminal standard for disproving justification could not be met.

The CCRB later substantiated separate allegations of departmental misconduct.

The family pursued civil litigation.

All of these facts exist at the same time.

And none of them should be casually substituted for another.

Less Than Two Minutes

Perhaps the most haunting fact is the amount of time involved.

According to the Attorney General's report, approximately a minute and a half separated the moment Rozario removed the scissors from the kitchen drawer from the moment he fell after the fifth gunshot.

Ninety seconds.

A lifetime can change in ninety seconds.

A mother can go from trying to restrain her son to watching him collapse.

A younger brother can go from explaining that his brother is having an episode to witnessing gunfire inside his own home.

Two police officers can arrive expecting to deal with a behavioral crisis and find themselves making split-second decisions involving deadly force.

And afterward, everyone is left trying to reconstruct those ninety seconds frame by frame.

That is exactly why the bodycam footage matters.

It preserves those moments.

Not perfectly.

Not from every possible angle.

But enough to allow investigators, journalists, attorneys, family members, and the public to see the sequence that words alone cannot fully describe.

The Moment That Keeps People Watching

There is a reason bodycam videos can hold viewers' attention for minutes at a time.

They do something ordinary news reports cannot.

They put the viewer inside the timeline.

You see the officers arrive.

You hear the conversations.

You watch the family respond.

Then you see the scissors.

The Taser.

The struggle.

The commands.

And suddenly, the sound changes.

Gunfire.

Five shots.

A young man falls.

The entire event happens so quickly that the viewer can easily miss important details during the first viewing.

That is why people often watch the footage again.

Not because the shooting itself is something to celebrate or sensationalize, but because viewers are trying to understand how the encounter moved from a 911 call to a fatal police shooting in such a short period.

And that is also why the official investigation matters.

The footage provides the images.

The investigative report provides the timeline.

The legal proceedings provide another layer of scrutiny.

Together, they allow the public to examine the incident rather than relying entirely on a single headline.

What We Know

We know that Win Rozario was 19 years old.

We know the incident occurred on March 27, 2024, in Ozone Park, Queens.

We know that Rozario himself placed the 911 call, according to the Attorney General's final investigation.

We know that officers Salvatore Alongi and Matthew Cianfrocco responded.

We know the officers entered the family's apartment.

We know Rozario took scissors from a kitchen drawer.

We know officers used Tasers.

We know Rozario's mother took the scissors away at one point.

We know he later picked them up again.

We know the officers fired their guns five times.

We know all five shots struck Rozario.

We know he was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

We know the Attorney General's Office conducted a full investigation.

We know the Attorney General's Office concluded in December 2025 that criminal charges against the officers would not be pursued because the evidence could not disprove justification beyond a reasonable doubt.

We also know that the CCRB later substantiated misconduct allegations against the officers, creating a separate disciplinary process.

And we know Rozario's family filed a federal civil lawsuit.

What We Should Not Assume

There are also things that should not be presented as settled facts.

The family's allegations in the lawsuit are allegations, not judicial findings.

The police department's justification for the shooting should not automatically be treated as the final word on every question surrounding the encounter.

Likewise, the CCRB's disciplinary findings should not be rewritten as a criminal conviction.

And the Attorney General's decision not to pursue criminal charges does not mean that every question about police procedure has been resolved.

The different investigations addressed different questions.

That distinction is essential when telling this story accurately.

The Bigger Story

Perhaps the deepest tragedy is that there may never be a single sentence capable of explaining what happened.

"Teen armed with scissors shot by police."

That is accurate as a headline, but it leaves out the beginning.

"Teen calls 911 during crisis and is killed by responding officers."

That captures another part of the story, but it does not explain the confrontation.

"Officers justified in fatal shooting."

That reflects the Attorney General's criminal-law conclusion, but it does not capture the disciplinary findings.

"Officers accused of excessive force."

That reflects another part of the case, but it does not erase the fact that Rozario was holding scissors and moving toward officers during the final confrontation.

The complete story is more complicated.

And that complexity is precisely why the footage has continued to draw attention.

A Family Home Became the Final Scene

There is something especially painful about the location.

This was not a deserted street.

It was not a remote building.

It was not a battlefield.

It was a family apartment.

A kitchen.

A doorway.

A chair.

A mother.

A younger brother.

A son.

And two police officers who had arrived because someone needed help.

Within minutes, the apartment became the scene of a fatal shooting.

The bodycam timestamp places the encounter in real time.

The footage preserves the sounds.

The investigation reconstructed the sequence.

The later legal proceedings continued the argument.

But none of those documents can change the most basic fact:

Win Rozario went into that apartment alive.

He did not leave it alive.

Two Years Later, the Questions Continue

The case did not disappear after the cameras were released.

In 2025, the CCRB's findings brought renewed attention to the conduct of the officers.

The federal lawsuit added another avenue through which the family could challenge the circumstances surrounding the death and its aftermath.

And the Attorney General's December 2025 report introduced recommendations for changing the way New York handles certain behavioral-health emergencies.

By 2026, the federal litigation was still active.

So the story is not simply an event frozen in a bodycam recording from March 27, 2024.

It has become part of a larger discussion about police response, mental-health emergencies, less-lethal tactics, officer decision-making, family involvement, and what should happen when someone in crisis calls for help.

Final Thoughts: The Ninety Seconds That Changed Everything

The most powerful part of the footage may not be the gunshots.

It may be everything that happens before them.

The ordinary sound of officers arriving.

The family trying to explain what was happening.

The movement through the apartment.

The sudden appearance of scissors.

The mother's attempt to take them away.

The repeated commands.

The Taser.

The struggle.

The words, "Don't shoot."

And then the gunfire.

Five shots.

Ninety seconds.

A 19-year-old life ended.

A mother and younger brother left to live with what they witnessed.

Two officers became the subject of years of investigations and disciplinary proceedings.

And a single bodycam recording became a piece of evidence in a much larger debate about what happens when police are asked to respond to someone experiencing a crisis.

The final Attorney General's investigation concluded that criminal charges could not be pursued because the evidence did not allow prosecutors to disprove the officers' justification beyond a reasonable doubt.

But the separate disciplinary findings and the family's continuing civil lawsuit show that the legal and institutional questions did not end there.

And perhaps that is the reason this video remains so difficult to look away from.

Because it does not show a story that began with a clear villain and ended with a clear answer.

It shows a series of decisions.

One after another.

Each one lasting only seconds.

And by the time the final decision was made, there was no way to take it back.