Sunday marks 25 years since one of the most tragic police shooting deaths in city history.

“Why? Why Amadou?” Kadiatou Diallo said.

The piercing cry of a mother whose son was shot down and killed by NYPD officers.

“I could not imagine what I was hearing. Some of the cop got time to reload I heard, I was told,” she said. “They emptied their gun on my son’s body.”

Four white police officers fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant who came to New York to go to college and achieve the American dream.

Kadiatou arrived on Wheeler Avenue in the Bronx, where her son was shot.

“Whoa, it was sad, it was shocking,” she said. “I have to say 25 years later, I am still standing, thank goodness.”

Shortly after midnight, on Feb. 4, 1999, Diallo, 23, was standing in the doorway of his own home when officers from the NYPD’s Street Crime Unit rolled up in an unmarked car.

They said they were looking for an armed rape suspect when they approached Diallo; the officers said they thought he went for a gun, but Diallo was unarmed. He had a wallet and a beeper.

“My family back home protected me from knowing how many shots my son were fired at. Slowly, I learned how it happened,” Kadiatou said.

He had arrived in New York a couple of years prior from West Africa, hoping to go to college, according to his mom.

At the time of Diallo’s shooting death by police, Rudy Giuliani was the city's mayor. To fight crime, he supported aggressive policing.

Diallo’s death sparked a movement. Large crowds would show up on his Bronx street and across the city to protest.

They also gathered outside police headquarters in Lower Manhattan to rally.

Hundreds were arrested, including elected officials and celebrities.

The four officers involved were indicted on murder in the second degree and other charges.

In a rare move, the courts agreed with the defense team to move the trial out of the city up to Albany.

The jury of seven white men, one white woman and four Black women found the officers not guilty, acquitting them of all charges.

Kadiatou said right now, she doesn’t hold a grudge against the officers who killed her son, but she won’t forget.

The pain and emotions sometime come bubbling to the surface over the death of her oldest son.

“I miss him. I really do. He had such a great smile. He was kind,” Kadiatou said. “Sometime. It’s not easy, but you know how I handle it. When it come, I’ll just let it flow because you can’t change anything.”

Kadiatou said she still regrets how her son was portrayed as just a poor West African street peddler because he was living a humble life.

“Nothing was further from the truth. Amadou was born in Liberia, September 1975. He grew up in Liberia, in Togo, in Guinea, and we also lived in Thailand where he graduated high school," she said. "After that, because his passion was computer science, he went to Singapore and he went to school in Singapore, computer school.”

Twenty-five years ago, she basically said the same thing. “I want got tell the world I am in sorrow. I want to take my boy home and bury him,” Kadiatou said.

She said he was hoping to make it on his own without his parents’ help.

In his memory, she started the Amadou Diallo Foundation and said it has given out has 54 scholarships to students in New York.

Kadiatou has also set up a computer literacy program in Guinea.

She vowed to spend the rest of her life helping to educate others and no longer hold public vigils for her son after this year.

“No memorials after the 25th year, but if I live through the 41st year, of course there will be another memorial because that would be something,” Kadiatou said.

That would be 41 years, for 41 shots.