WASHINGTON — For the first time in decades, the F.B.I. is trying to fire an agent for intentionally shooting a suspect, after finding that the agent violated bureau policy when he wounded an unarmed man who had apparently helped break into his Lexus outside his home in Queens.

The agent, who was off duty, fired at the man from a second-story window, hitting him in the back. The man claimed that he was running away when the agent shot him, but a government investigation concluded otherwise. Still, the bureau deemed the decision to fire a “bad shoot,” in agents’ parlance.

The F.B.I. has not announced its finding about the shooting, which took place on July 18, 2012. But the bureau provided three internal reports about the investigation to The New York Times in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

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An apartment complex in Orlando, Fla., where Ibragim Todashev was killed by an F.B.I. agent last month.The F.B.I. Deemed Agents Faultless in 150 ShootingsJUNE 18, 2013
It is extraordinarily rare for the F.B.I. to deem improper an intentional shooting by one of its agents. The bureau faulted the agent for violating its lethal force policy about six months after The Times reported that the F.B.I. had found to be justified at least 150 consecutive shooting episodes dating at least to 1993.

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Document: F.B.I. Releases Documents About 2012 Shooting in Queens
The disclosure of the disciplinary action against the agent, Navin Kalicharan, who is fighting the dismissal, comes at a time of heightened national scrutiny of shootings by law enforcement officials.

Under the F.B.I.’s lethal force policy, agents may fire their weapons only if there is an imminent risk of death or serious bodily injury. A 12-member “shooting incident review group” that examined Mr. Kalicharan’s case said there was insufficient evidence to believe that a man “involved in a minor property crime out on the street” posed any immediate danger to people indoors and upstairs.

The panel unanimously concluded that Mr. Kalicharan had violated the lethal force policy. It said it appeared that the agent had been worried not about his own safety, but instead “was concerned about his car.”

Mr. Kalicharan did not respond to a request for comment. His lawyer, Lawrence Berger, predicted that his client would be vindicated after a hearing to appeal the decision to dismiss him.

“We are vigorously defending his tenure, and we are vigorously defending the shoot,” Mr. Berger said. “It was an eminently ‘good shoot,’ based on a perception of an overt threat of serious bodily injury to my client.”

Mr. Kalicharan, then 35, told the F.B.I. investigators that the man he shot, a Jamaican immigrant named Adrian Ricketts, was standing at the trunk of the Lexus, reaching toward his waistband as though he had a gun. Mr. Kalicharan said he feared that Mr. Ricketts was going to shoot.

Investigators found no evidence that Mr. Ricketts, then 23, was armed. Surveillance video from a nearby day care center showed him running, then falling about 12 feet away from the car. But the F.B.I., while faulting Mr. Kalicharan, concluded that forensic evidence, including the shape of a bullet hole in a window screen, supported the agent’s basic version of events. The video, it said, showed Mr. Ricketts tripping, not being hit.

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Mr. Ricketts declined to comment. His lawyer, David Levine, said that regardless of whether his client was running when he was shot, the agent’s actions were unjustified.

The bullet entered the right side of Mr. Ricketts’s back and became lodged too close to his spine for doctors to remove it, although a Justice Department report said he had suffered no significant lasting adverse consequences.

When F.B.I. agents fire their weapons away from a shooting range, the bureau conducts an administrative review to decide whether they complied with its lethal force policy.

The current form of the process dates to 1995, when the bureau’s director at the time, Louis J. Freeh, ordered an overhaul. Previously, the internal process had deemed justified a shot by an F.B.I. sniper that killed the wife of a white supremacist during the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, but the Justice Department said it was improper.

Previous F.B.I. shooting review reports dating to 1993, also obtained by The Times, show no instance in which the review group, before or after that overhaul, found a violation of policy in an intentional-shooting case. (It has censured agents who fired without hitting anyone, like a warning shot into the air.)

The string of intentional shootings in which agents were cleared most likely goes back longer. Mr. Berger, who is also general counsel of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said no agents had been found at fault since he began representing agents in shooting reviews in 1989.

The Times has used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain F.B.I. shooting reports in several batches. It sought the disclosure of the group’s report on the Queens episode as part of a broader request — filed on Feb. 19, 2014, one day after the date on the report — for all shooting reviews completed since its previous such request in December 2012.

The F.B.I. provided documents in response to that request in November but omitted the Queens report. The Times appealed, and the bureau produced the Queens report in July.

While faulting Mr. Kalicharan, the review group report presents his version of events as fact and does not mention that Mr. Ricketts had said he was running away. After inquiries by The Times, the bureau provided two additional documents describing the investigation.

The F.B.I. redacted names in all three documents, but news reports have named Mr. Ricketts, and The Times identified Mr. Kalicharan through other records.

The documents show that the New York Police Department, the Queens district attorney’s office and the F.B.I.’s Inspection Division reconstructed the shooting, studying angles and sight lines. They asked the F.B.I.’s forensic evidence lab in Quantico, Va., to analyze the surveillance video and the bullet hole in the screen.

Investigators, citing three reasons, decided that the evidence fit Mr. Kalicharan’s assertion that he fired at Mr. Ricketts behind the Lexus, not where Mr. Ricketts fell, according to one report.

First, after enhancing the video, the F.B.I. said that Mr. Ricketts’s upper body had toppled while his feet had remained stable, which looked like tripping, not a bullet impact.

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Second, from his window, Mr. Kalicharan had an unobstructed view of the Lexus, but tree branches partly obscured the view of the spot where Mr. Ricketts fell.

Finally, F.B.I. technicians shot the window screen from both angles and studied the shape of the holes and the splay of the fibers. The tear matching Mr. Kalicharan’s account was “nearly identical” to the one from the episode, while the other one “could not have been more different,” the report said.

In March 2013, the Queens district attorney’s office announced that it wanted to submit the findings about the episode — without disclosing such details — to a grand jury. But Mr. Kalicharan and Mr. Ricketts made a deal not to testify against each other, so prosecutors dropped the matter.

Mr. Levine, the lawyer, said Mr. Ricketts, a green card holder, believed he had been unjustly shot, but feared risking a felony conviction that might lead to deportation. (A criminal history search showed that he had apparently not been in trouble since the Queens episode.)

In October 2013, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division decided not to recommend charging Mr. Kalicharan with willfully using excessive force.

Mr. Levine said the Civil Rights Division never interviewed his client, and he criticized its report for twice stating that Mr. Ricketts had survived with no major health consequences, saying that was beside the point.

The Civil Rights Division report did say that Mr. Kalicharan’s decision to shoot was “difficult to understand.”

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COMMENTS
Christopher Allen, an F.B.I. spokesman, said that he could not comment on personnel matters, but that the bureau had “an effective, time-tested process” for addressing shooting episodes.

David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in policing issues, said larger conclusions about the review process could not be drawn from this case, given its unusual circumstances and the F.B.I.’s history.

“You are looking at a case they just did not think they could ignore,” he said. “If you want to hold this case up and say, ‘See, the system works,’ I’d have to see a little bit more evidence.”
