Akai Gurley's mom speaks for first time: 'I need justice'

Christie M Farriella/for New York Daily News

As relatives prepared to say goodbye to police shooting victim Akai Gurley, a family feud erupted over the Rev. Al Sharpton.

The National Action Network founder had planned to speak at the 28-year-old's wake Friday night, but he changed his mind after a family member said he was not welcome.

'Al Sharpton came in, put his name on the situation, but has not even made one single call to the parents of Akai,' Gurley's aunt Hertenceia Peterson told TMZ.com. Peterson, who said she was speaking for Gurley's mother, Sylvia Palmer, claimed Sharpton doesn't want justice for her nephew but 'money and political gain.'

Sharpton - who has criticized the NYPD repeatedly over Gurley's death at the hands of a nervous rookie cop in a dark Brooklyn housing project stairwell - said he was asked to speak by Kimberly Ballinger, the shooting victim's domestic partner and mother of his 2-year-old daughter.

He switched gears after Peterson lashed out at him. Sharpton said he didn't want to be part of what he characterized as 'a dispute in the family.'

'I don't want to get in the middle of it,' he told the Daily News Friday. 'I didn't know until today that the mother and the sister and the domestic partner weren't together.'

Ballinger, who was escorted into Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with NAN member Kirsten John Foy on Friday, defended Sharpton.

'Rev. Al Sharpton has been here for us since day one,' she said. 'We want justice. I want to see an indictment.'

Melissa Butler, the 27-year-old woman who was with Gurley the night he was killed, was overwhelmed with grief and couldn't speak as former City Councilman Charles Barron escorted her into the church.

'It's very painful for the family,' Barron said. 'We just want to get through tonight as smoothly as possible. It's rough.'

About 200 people paid their respects to Gurley, gingerly touching the young man's bone-white casket as it sat in the front of the chapel.

The Rev. Dennis Dillon urged mourners to use the wake as an outlet to deal with the tragic loss of 'a father, son, a brother and another black man killed at the hands of the NYPD.'

Despite his no-show Friday night, Sharpton promised to continue to speak out for justice on behalf of Gurley's family.

The feud comes as Gurley's mother, speaking publicly for the first time, demanded justice for her son.

'There's nothing in this world that can heal my pain and my heartache,' Palmer said Friday as she broke down in tears. 'I need justice for my son because my son didn't deserve to die like that.'

'I feel like I'm laying in the morgue with him right now,' Palmer added at the Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. She said nothing about Sharpton when she addressed the media.

'He loved life more than life itself and, most importantly, he loved his mother,' Palmer said hours before her son's wake. 'The night my son was murdered, he went out to get his hair braided to come home and surprise me for Thanksgiving. Now, there will never be another Thanksgiving, another Christmas, another Valentine's, birthday, social gatherings...My son was my heart and now he's been taken away from me.'She said nothing about Sharpton when she addressed the media.

Christie M Farriella/for New York Daily News

Palmer broke her silence hours after The News revealed that Gurley's shooter, Officer Peter Liang, was texting his union rep as the unarmed man lay dying.

It was a neighbor's 911 call that alerted emergency responders to the shooting inside a pitch-black Pink Houses stairwell on Nov. 20.

Police union spokesman Al O'Leary on Friday said, 'None of our delegates in the area received any texts.'

Officials said Liang was holding a flashlight in his right hand and a Glock 9-mm. in the other when he opened the door to the eighth-floor landing. Liang's gun went off - and the bullet apparently ricocheted into the chest of Gurley who was one floor below.

During the frenzied aftermath, the cops' commanding officer and an emergency operator tried to reach them in vain, sources said.

'We believe the officers should be charged with a homicide,' local organizer Kevin Powell said Friday, flanked by Gurley's mother and stepfather Kenneth Palmer.

'We don't believe it was an accident...This feels like a series of modern day lynchings,' Powell said, referencing the deaths of Gurley and Eric Garner, who died after a cop put him in a chokehold.

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With BARRY PADDOCK, THOMAS TRACY

oyaniv@nydailynews.com