Police said the man told officers he had a gun during a tense encounter inside a Mott Haven apartment.
NEW YORK, NY — NYPD officers serving an arrest warrant in the Bronx shot and killed a 44-year-old man early Thursday after he refused orders to come out of a bedroom and said he had a gun, police said.
The shooting happened during a warrant operation in Mott Haven and quickly became the latest police killing in New York to draw scrutiny over tactics, body-camera evidence and the split between police and civilian accounts. Officers said they spent about 90 seconds trying to talk Lucien Colon into surrendering before one officer fired. Colon’s girlfriend said police forced their way in and killed him without cause. By late Thursday, key questions about the weapon, the warrant and the review timeline were still unresolved.
Police said members of the Bronx Warrant Squad and fugitive enforcement unit went to 105 Willis Ave. around 6:45 or 7:15 a.m. to arrest Colon on a bench warrant tied to missed reporting obligations. Authorities said the warrant stemmed from parole or sex-offender reporting issues, and they described Colon as a convicted felon and registered sex offender. Officers were let into the apartment by a woman inside, according to police. Once inside, they moved toward a bedroom where Colon was located. Deputy Chief John Wilson said officers told Colon to show his hands, and Colon answered, “I have a gun.” Wilson said officers then ordered him to step out of the room and Colon replied, “It’s not going to happen.” After what police described as roughly a minute and a half of repeated commands and attempted de-escalation, one officer fired, striking Colon near the face. He was taken to Lincoln Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Police said no officers were shot or otherwise physically hurt during the encounter, though they were taken to a hospital for evaluation. At an afternoon briefing, officials displayed a photograph of the object recovered at the scene and said it appeared to be a gun, but they stopped short of saying it was a working firearm. Wilson said investigators still needed to process the scene before determining whether the weapon was real or possibly a BB gun. That uncertainty became one of the central disputes in the case within hours of the shooting. Police also said the entire encounter was captured on officers’ body-worn cameras. Colon’s girlfriend, identified by local television outlets as Marivel Alicea or Marivel Antoinette, gave a sharply different account. She said officers pushed past her at the door, frightened her dog, and did not show her the warrant before entering. She said she moved into a bathroom with the dog after police drew a weapon. A police spokesperson later said the body-camera footage showed officers were given permission to enter the apartment.
The records and background described by police added another layer to the story, though some details were reported differently by local outlets as officials continued to brief the case. Police said Colon was 44 and had a long criminal history that included violent felony and sex-offense convictions. One account described him as on parole after serving a 10-year sentence for attempted murder of an 18-year-old woman. Another said he was on parole for a 2013 homicide and had a rape conviction from the 1990s. What was consistent across the early reporting was that officers were not at the apartment on a random patrol but to carry out a targeted arrest tied to court or supervision requirements. The setting also mattered. Willis Avenue, near Bruckner Boulevard and East 132nd Street, sits in a dense section of Mott Haven where apartment entries, narrow hallways and early-morning operations can compress decisions into seconds. That helps explain why police emphasized the short timeline and why neighbors and family members focused on whether officers gave Colon a realistic chance to surrender.
What happens next will follow a familiar but closely watched path. Under New York law, the state attorney general’s Office of Special Investigation reviews cases in which police may have caused a person’s death. That does not mean charges are expected, but it does mean the killing will be assessed outside the NYPD chain of command for possible criminal conduct. Inside the department, investigators also will review the shooting, the body-camera video and the warrant service itself. The new city policy announced last month generally requires the NYPD to release body-camera footage from critical incidents within 30 calendar days, though officials can delay release if an investigation is unusually complex, a court blocks publication, or relatives need time to view the video first. By Thursday night, the department had not said whether the officer who fired had been identified publicly, whether that officer had been placed on modified duty, or when the first footage might be released. Authorities also had not publicly released the bench warrant itself.
Outside the apartment, grief and anger mixed with the official account of restraint. Colon’s girlfriend described him as damaged by years of addiction and neglect but not beyond help. “He had a good heart. He had a bad life since youth,” Alicea said in one interview, adding that he had struggled with K2 and heroin. In another, she called him her “ride-and-die partner” and said she wished she had stayed in the room with him. A friend and neighbor questioned the police version of events and said the object officers focused on had been in the bedroom. Police, meanwhile, framed the shooting as the end of a tense armed standoff inside a small apartment, with Wilson saying officers “showed extreme restraint” before the gunfire. Those competing narratives are likely to shape the public response more than any single early fact. The body-camera video, once reviewed by investigators and possibly released, could become the clearest evidence in determining whether the final seconds matched the words offered Thursday by police and by the people who lived there.
As of Thursday night, Colon was dead, the officer’s shot remained under investigation, and the biggest unanswered question was whether the object in his hand was a real firearm. The next major milestones are the completion of scene testing, the attorney general review and any public release of body-camera video later this month.
Author note: Last updated April 2, 2026.