The photo was taken 11 years before Deborah Danner was shot dead by an NYPD sergeant in her own bedroom.

It shows Danner smiling, standing with Mayor Michael Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion. The occasion - a celebration of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was found among Danner’s possessions after she was killed, and is being showed here for the first time. .

“This is not somebody who is deranged and doesn’t know what they are doing. She was a very smart woman,” Jennifer Danner said in an exclusive interview with NY1, a day after Sgt. Hugh Barry was acquitted of murder and other charges in the shooting.

“This disease just ate at her. I watched her, the sister I grew up with for 60 years, just fading away from me,” Jennifer Danner said in the interview, her first sis her sister’s death.

Deborah Danner’s death fueled a national debate about how the police handle the mentally ill. Jennifer Danner, who is suing the city, says the police and the courts failed her sister.

“I had faith in the system,” she says.

“I could have been out there with Black Lives Matter, screaming, hollering. Don’t get me wrong. They are a good organization.  I felt I didn’t want to do that. I said, ‘You know what? This man shot my sister. I said I am going to get justice for her.’ But when that judge got up there and… read down all those things that said, ‘Not Guilty, Not Guilty, Not Guilty.’ …I think everybody was in shock. What the hell just happened here?”

“All the police officers were not telling the truth. All the stories contradicted. If anybody could get hold of the transcripts, they would see that. My sister never swung a bat at Hugh Barry’s head.”

The night she was killed, on Oct. 18, 2016, Danner, 66, was screaming and tearing down posters in the hallway of her building. Police were called. She grabbed scissors, and then a baseball bat. Barry shot her dead.

Jennifer Danner says Debbie, a paranoid schizophrenic, could be belligerent, and angry, and disappear for weeks or months at a time. But Jennifer says there was another side to her sister, one the public does not know: A woman who was smart, loved music, went to church, took guitar lessons, and enjoyed computers.

Jennifer remembered the time her sister was committed to a hospital north of the city for six months.

“It was like night and day, like having the old Debbie back. But with schizophrenics, they take their medicine (and) they say, ‘Oh I am fine … I don’t need to take it anymore,’ and then they spiral again. This was her life.”

Jennifer said it was hard seeing her sister like that, but it was worse for their mother. “She told me on more than one occasion, she says, ‘Jenny, I know somebody’s going to knock on this door, and tell me she is dead.”

Jennifer says cops had been called to her sister’s apartment before, and each time, officers with the specially trained Emergency Services Unit took Debbie away without any harm. “They looked like a SWAT team. They knocked down the door. They go and get her. EMS goes and puts her on a stretcher, and it is done.”

Jennifer says the night her sister was killed, as she headed to her sister’s apartment, she was sure that would happen again, and everything would be OK.

“I was happy the police were there,” she said.

“I got the guardianship papers … I had them in my hand, I was on my way over there knowing that she was going to be going to Jacobi Hospital because that’s where they always take her.”

“Never did I think I would never see my sister again – except at the hospital, identifying her body.”

The President of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Ed Mullins, said after the verdict that, “Any police officer put in those circumstances …would more than likely react the same way.” And Barry’s attorney, Andrew Quinn, said, “That was the entire crux of the prosecution’s case, ‘Well he could've done something different, and if he did this would've never happened.’ And that is a ridiculous proposition."

Barry and the other officers who responded that night were not part of the Emergency Services Unit. In delivering his verdict in the non-jury trial, Judge Robert Neary said the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Sgt. Barry did not fear for his life when he fired his gun twice. Jennifer Danner said she does not believe Sgt. Barry’s account that he had no choice but to shoot her sister.

“That was her safe place. She always went to her bedroom when they came to get her,” she said.

“He had other resources. He had no reason to shoot her.… She was not that close to him. He had a Taser, he was taller than her, he had mace. He could have maced her, he could have done a lot of other things. … He said he shot her to stop the threat. She was no threat to him.”

She added, “My thought is, my sister standing there, with a bat, looking at a man, pointing a gun at her, and shooting her. Can you imagine what that probably felt like to her? And she was shot twice.” 

“She should be alive, and if I had my way she would be in the hospital but I didn’t get a chance to get my way. All I had was a bunch of papers saying, ‘I’m her guardian,’ that I can do nothing with, because she is gone.”