N.Y. Police on Trial in Wedding-Day Killing

Protesters display the number of bullets three police detectives fired at Sean Bell after he left his bachelor party. (By Gary He -- Associated Press)

No one disputes what came next. Isnora began shooting, firing 11 rounds. Four other officers fired afterward: Officer Michael Carey three times, Cooper four times, Detective Paul Headley once, and Oliver 31 times, including a pause to reload. Oliver fired the shot that killed Bell.

A grand jury chose not to indict Carey, and Headley was never charged.

James Culleton, an attorney for Oliver, said his client heard Isnora yelling, "He's got a gun! He's got a gun!" The knowledge that there was no gun is "hindsight wisdom," he said.

Anthony Ricco, Isnora's attorney, said Bell and his friends saw Isnora as only a black man with a gun. When Bell drove his car at the officers, he said, "he intended to run the black man into the ground."

Two officers overheard Guzman say, "Go get my gun," Ricco said.

Paul Martin, an attorney for Cooper, said his client, a 19-year police veteran, "doesn't even belong in this courtroom." Cooper fired four shots from the back of a police vehicle, one of which hit a nearby train platform.

After opening statements, Bell's fiancee, Nicole Paultre Bell, 23, who took his name after he died, took the stand. The mother of Bell's two daughters -- Jada, 5, and Jordyn, 1 -- was composed as she recounted meeting Bell when they were in high school. They dated for six years and planned to marry near the anniversary of the date he met her parents.

She broke down only when she described visiting the hospital on what was to be her wedding day. "He was in the morgue," she said.