She Endures the Trial of Officer Who Shot Her Husband

Sometimes she props her head up with her hands. Other times, she buries her face in her lap and hides her eyes in the silk of her elegant, salmon and gray African-style dress.Following the manslaughter trial of the undercover police officer who shot her husband to death two summers ago has not been easy for the 28-year-old widow left behind, Salimata Sanfo Zongo.She cannot understand a word the prosecutors, defense attorneys, witnesses, the judge, or reporters, are saying.Her language is Moore, an ethnic dialect in Zogbega Yako, a small village of 3,000 in Burkina Faso, a former French colony in West Africa and one of the 10 poorest countries in the world, from which she and Zongo’s brothers, Daouda and Illissa, traveled in sandals and robes to sit under the pale fluorescent lights of Manhattan criminal court.With the assistance of attorneys Sanford Rubenstein and Michael Hardy, she and the family are also seeking a civil claim of $150 million, a sum virtually incomprehensible in her village, where the average income is $3,000 a year.She does not understand the testimony of the captain and lieutenant who told those sitting in a crowded Manhattan criminal courtroom this week that they virtually had no detailed plans on how they would execute the raid for counterfeit DVDs that would eventually end with her husband dead on the floor of a Chelsea warehouse with four bullet wounds and Mr. Conroy, a rookie cop from Staten Island, whisked away in an ambulance first.She does not understand the testimony of the forensic crime scene experts, who talked about shell casings and slugs found near where they found Zongo’s body slumped against a storage locker.Some members of the mosque in Harlem where Zongo prayed five times a day have been attempting to whisper all the developments in the case into her ear during the court sessions. Much of the information, especially the details, does not make it through.It is all the rumblings and murmurs of a language as foreign and weird as the take-out Chinese she eats during the lunch recess and the budget motel near where she and Daouda and Illissa Zongo have been staying. The priciest rooms go for $94 a night.Her stay here, in so many ways, has been defined by contrasts. The motel is also near the tallest structure standing in New York right now, the Empire State Building, all 1,252 towering feet. The tallest building in Burkina Faso is a bank 12 stories tall.Still, through a translator, she said that, under the circumstances, she was enjoying her stay.When asked earlier this week how she had been gauging the developments in the trial she said she had looked into the eyes of the jurors and could see that they ultimately would side with her God and give justice to her husband. When asked yesterday how she thought the trial was going, she could not immediately say. She was eating a bagel.

She Endures the Trial of Officer Who Shot Her Husband

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