An Elmont minister was in his home when he heard gunshots a little after 3 a.m. in December 1995. He went to his window and watched a police officer fire two shots into the body of a man lying on the ground offering no resistance, according to his testimony in a civil case five years later. The only motions the man made were “two twitches” as the bullets hit him, he testified.

The man was 28-year-old Christopher Wade, a parolee who had served time for a drug-related offense. Nassau Police Officer Raymond had stopped Wade on suspicion of buying drugs. He said he opened fire after Wade pointed a gun at him.

A police department review of the incident showed Raymond fired 16 shots, including some after he reloaded his weapon when his gun jammed. Nine of the bullets tore into Wade’s chest, arms, kidney, shoulder, liver, lungs and head. Wade died at the scene with no drugs found in his possession.

Wade’s family insisted he had not been armed and that he had just gone out to buy cigarettes. Raymond turned over a loaded .32 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver that he said he had kicked out of Wade’s hand.

Tests showed that it had not been fired and bore no fingerprints, according to a Feb. 5, 1997 Newsday account of the case.

Five months after the shooting, a Nassau grand jury cleared Raymond of any wrongdoing.

In a subsequent federal lawsuit filed by Wade’s family against the police department and Raymond, the department produced personnel documents showing Raymond had been the subject of 19 civilian complaints during a his tenure with the NYPD before joining the Nassau PD. The complaints, which ranged from the use of racial slurs and assault, were all ruled unsubstantiated.

Raymond also had been arrested twice, according to news accounts of the case. The first arrest came in 1982, when he was 18 and working as a gas station attendant. He was charged with stealing $250 in receipts from the gas station and falsely reporting that there had been a robbery. The charges were dismissed.

Then in 1989, while still with the NYPD, a Queens grand jury indicted Raymond for official misconduct in connection with an on-duty altercation at a bar. The indictment was later dismissed.

Despite those past issues, the Nassau police department hired Raymond in 1994, a year before he shot Wade.

When the Wade family’s civil rights lawsuit went to trial five years after the shooting, Raymond testified that he felt his life was in danger. The jury disagreed, and in December 2000, jurors awarded Wade’s family $2.25 million.

Frederick K. Brewington, the Wade family’s attorney, prepared another claim against Nassau County arguing that it had been negligent in hiring Raymond given his prior arrests and civilian complaints. However, the family offered to withdraw the suit if the county agreed to set up an independent civilian review board to investigate complaints against officers that are deemed unsubstantiated by the police department.

The county’s attorneys said the county had done nothing wrong in hiring Raymond and rejected the offer. The court later dismissed the family’s second suit.

In subsequent years, Raymond was named as a defendant in four more federal lawsuits alleging excessive force. In two cases, juries ruled in favor of the police and a third ended in a judge’s dismissal. A fourth lawsuit, filed in 2009 against Nassau County, Raymond and five other cops, was settled with a $255,000 payment to the plaintiff Louis Martire, according to Gregory Calliste Jr., Martire’s attorney.

Martire alleged that Raymond and other officers severely beat him when he was arrested and jailed after a fight at a family wedding in September 2008. Martire claimed police punched him in the back, kicked and kneed him in the ribs, slammed his head against a bench and left him lying in a pool of blood.

Because disciplinary actions against police are not public, it is unclear whether Raymond faced departmental discipline in connection with any of the incidents for which he was sued.

State records do show, however, that he remained on the job until March 2012, when he retired. He collects a $123,303 annual pension.

Raymond did not respond to a request for an interview made through the police department.

