An Unlikely Candidacy, Forged by Tragedy

(New York Times) — If all had gone according to plan, Nicole Paultre Bell, 26, would not be running for City Council to represent a district in southeast Queens. She would be living in Atlanta with her husband, raising their two young daughters, possibly doing some part-time work at a collection agency, as she had in the past, or maybe studying for some kind of degree in health care.  That was the tentative plan: happily ever after; a small, anonymous piece of Queens transplanted to an equally obscure life somewhere in the South. But as nearly everyone in New York knows by now, things did not follow the plan. Instead, in the early hours of their wedding day, her husband-to-be, Sean Bell, died outside a nightclub, shot by New York police officers. Three officers involved were acquitted of manslaughter and other charges, but Mr. Bell’s name became a rallying cry against police brutality, granting him a permanent place in the history of New York, even its geography: three blocks of Queens have been renamed Sean Bell Way.

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