More than a year after Akai Gurley was gunned down by police in a darkened in the stairwell of a darkened East New York housing project, the family of unarmed Gurley has filed a wrongful-death suit naming the city and New York Police Department as primary defendants.

The New York Times reports Kimberly Ballinger filed the suit on Thursday in Brooklyn Supreme Court, identifying herself as Gurley's domestic partner and deeming the filing on behalf of his estate and their 2-year-old daughter, Akaila.

Also named as defendants are the New York City Housing authority and patrolman Peter Liang, the officer who fired the fatal shots around Thanksgiving 2014.

Several media outlets have reported Liang shot the 28-year-old Gurley after he and Ballinger had entered the building where she lived. The two briefly encountered one another on the seventh floor, and moments later Gurley lay dead of a gunshot wound to the chest.

Liang had been on the job just 18-months at the time of the incident and has since been criminally indicted on charges including second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. In addition, Ballinger's suit contends Liang acted "without reason or provocation" and "negligently and recklessly." It also argues that the city housing authority "created a hazardous and trap like condition" by failing to provide adequate lighting in the staircases.

At a Thursday news conference, Ballinger's attorney Scott Rynecki also charged that officers had been instructed by superiors to no longer employ so-called vertical patrol methods during their shifts but were actually engaging is such practices at the time of Gurley's shooting.

"There was no reason or provocation for having a weapon out of a holster and in the hand," said Rynecki, adding that he hoped the suit would lead to citywide reforms, among them the hiring of an independent auditor to review the training on how officers handle their weapons while on patrol.