Star Cop Killed a Black Man. Then Came Another Tragic Twist.
On Monday, Jan. 17—Martin Luther King Jr. Day—34-year-old Orenzso Bovell was murdered in his car by an unknown assailant.
The young Brooklynite died in his sister’s arms after he was shot on the corner of Quincy Street and Patchen Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, his mother, Lorna Wright-Bovell, told The Daily Beast.
While detectives at the local 81st NYPD precinct have not yet identified a suspect in the case, Wright-Bovell received rather different, jolting news on Wednesday: that the investigators on the case are currently being overseen by the police chief who killed her eldest son in 2008.
Nearly 14 years before Orenzso’s death, Ortanzso Bovell, a 25-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by then-Lieutenant John Chell of the NYPD.
Now-Deputy Chief Chell was never criminally charged for the killing—which he maintained was an accident—and has continued his ascent in the New York City Police Department. That has led him all the way to a perch as commanding officer for Brooklyn North detectives, essentially the indirect boss of the investigators on Orenzso’s case.
Only two weeks before Orenzso’s murder, Chell appeared besides NYC Mayor Eric Adams as part of the administration’s first big show of a nascent war against gun violence, specifically to announce a 17-person gang takedown in Brooklyn.
But ever since her elder son’s death in 2008, Wright-Bovell and others have questioned Chell’s continued rise. Most notably, in 2017, Wright-Bovell won $1.5 million from the city in a high-profile civil trial where a jury found Chell intentionally shot the gun that killed Ortanzso.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/john-chell-nypd-chief-who-killed-ortanzso-bovell-helps-oversee-cops-probing-murder-of-his-brother-orenzso?ref=home