Ex-Prosecutor Told Cops She Fired 9mm 'Barbie Gun' to Show Local Teen It Wasn't a Toy
A former New York prosecutor who is now in private practice reportedly told police she fired a pink 9mm pistol into a ground to show a neighborhood teen it wasn’t a toy “Barbie gun” after becoming exasperated when somebody repeatedly rang her doorbell and disappeared.
“I shot that gun yesterday for the first time. I felt like I had balls,” Bernadette Greenwald told Long Island police after the incident, reports the New York Post. She practices law under her maiden name of Bernadette Nicchia.
Charged with second-degree menacing, reckless endangerment and unlawful use of a weapon, she was released without bail after her arraignment yesterday.
The mother of the teen, who lives across the street and wasn’t charged, said he had nothing to do with the prank and was simply walking home from a friend’s house. “They’re crazy over there,” she told the newspaper.
However, Greenwald’s lawyer, Mitchell Barnett, says his client did nothing wrong. The neighbor teen, he contends, was trespassing after drinking a few beers with his friends and had given the family trouble before.
WABC-TV says the teen told police he passed another youth on the sidewalk and walked closer to Greenwald’s home in Rockville Centre to figure out what was causing a commotion inside it.
Encountering Greenwald, who, the 17-year-old said, pointed a gun at him and asked him repeatedly, “What are you doing?” he put up his hands and backed up into her home as she walked toward him with the weapon.
Inside, the teen told police, Greenwald’s daughter was standing on the stairway and told her mom, ‘Don’t shoot him, you’ll go to jail.”
Police were called to the scene by a report of a burglary in progress from someone in the house.
