Family seeks answers after NYPD fatally shoots man
<p>A family is seeking answers after police shot and killed a man armed with a machete while serving a search warrant at the wrong Bronx apartment, they claim.</p>
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Dec 5, 2017, 11:32 AM
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Updated 2,579 days ago
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A family is seeking answers after police shot and killed a man armed with a machete while serving a search warrant at the wrong Bronx apartment, they claim.
Officers were searching for drugs and guns inside of an apartment at 230 Brook Ave. around 4 a.m. Tuesday when they encountered Mario Sanabria, 69, holding a two-foot-long blade in a back bedroom.
They say they ordered Sanabria to drop the weapon, but he did not listen. An officer shot him once in the chest. He later died at Lincoln Hospital.
"My uncle really didn't deserve that," says Sanabria's nephew, Yibrin Sanabria Ruiz. "He probably didn't understand what the cops were saying, because he doesn't speak a lick of English."
Police say they were initially looking for a different man, who they took into custody outside of the building.
Relatives say Sanabria lived with another family member who is in his early 90s. That man's son, Miguel Angel Conde, is who police took into custody. But they released Conde after he says they realized they had the wrong guy.
Conde spent most of the day facing police questioning at the 40th Precinct. He says police had a warrant out for him on suspicion of guns and narcotics, but they ultimately let him go -- after he says they told him he was in the clear.
Conde says police showed him a picture of himself, but it bore the name Daniel Conde.
"That's not me. I'm not related. I don't know him," he tells News 12.
It's unclear why police were at Miguel Conde's home if they were looking for Daniel Conde. The NYPD did not immediately respond to News 12's request for comment.
Relatives remember Sanabria as a calm, quiet man. They say he served in the Honduran military before immigrating to the United States in the 1990s.
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