Tag: police killings

New video shows teen kidnapping victim gunned down by cops as she ran toward them for help

Newly released video from law enforcement shows the moment California cops fatally shot an unarmed 15-year-old girl who was reported missing.

The harrowing footage released Monday shows Savannah Graziano slowly approaching officers along the 15 Freeway in Hesperia, Calif. on Sept. 27, 2022, one day after witnessing her father, Anthony John Graziano, 45, murder her mother, Tracy Martinez, ABC7 reported.

Moments later, gunfire erupts and Savannah is shot down in the crossfire.

“Stop shooting her! He’s in the car! Stop! She’s OK! He’s in the car! … Stop!” the deputy can be heard yelling.

The footage was released after reporters requested it under the California Public Records Act.

Keep reading

Revealed: at least 22 Californians have died while being held face down by police since 2016

Police have long known the dangers of holding people in prone restraint. So why do so many keep dying?

On a Thursday morning in October 2020, less than five months after George Floyd was held on his stomach by Minneapolis police officers until he died, Shayne Sutherland called 911 from a convenience store in Stockton, California, and asked for a taxi.

When the operator told Sutherland he’d dialed 911, he said someone was trying to rob him.

Stockton police officers Ronald Zalunardo and John Afanasiev arrived at the store about 15 minutes later. In the meantime, a store employee had called 911, saying Sutherland was threatening him with a wine bottle.

In body camera footage that captured the officers’ response, Sutherland seems fidgety and his speech is difficult to understand at times, but he doesn’t appear violent and he isn’t armed. He cooperates with police, addressing Zalunardo as “sir” and sitting against a wall outside the store as instructed.

The officers question Sutherland. When he tells them he can’t remember why he’s under court supervision, Afanasiev says, “the drugs probably have something to do with it”.

“How long you been using meth,” Zalunardo asks. Sutherland stutters and says he’s been using cocaine.

Sutherland briefly stands, then sits when ordered to do so. A minute later he stands up again. This time, the officers tackle him to the ground and hold him belly down – a position known as prone restraint. Thirty seconds later, his hands are cuffed behind his back.

Keep reading

Fatal crash in police chase doesn’t count, Kansas says — because it was on purpose

When a Bonner Springs police officer began chasing a man in June 2021 for an expired license plate, speeds on Interstate 70 escalated to 100 mph.

Then the officer intentionally hit the car to bring the chase to an end, a maneuver called a tactical vehicle intervention or TVI.

The driver, Darrell Vincent, of Kansas City, Kansas, was ejected and killed.

In an odd loophole, Vincent’s death is not counted in statewide or federal statistics on police chases because the officer purposely struck his car.

That officials choose not to include injuries or deaths caused by deliberate actions by police is one example of how police chases are not reliably counted by state or federal authorities.

“I think that’s wrong because it was a chase,” said Darrius Vincent, Darrell Vincent’s son. “It cost him his life and I just don’t think that was a good thing. It was a very bad thing.”

Keep reading

Florida Bills Would Hide the Names of Police Officers Who Kill People 

Bills filed in Florida would allow law enforcement agencies to hide the names of police and correctional officers who kill people.

Such legislation was widely expected after the Florida Supreme Court ruled in December that police departments could not invoke Marsy’s Law, a crime victims’ rights law adopted by Florida voters in 2018, to hide the names of officers involved in deadly shootings. The ruling was much broader than expected, though, and stripped privacy protections from civilian crime victims as well.

The legislation is one of several efforts in the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature to further insulate police in the Sunshine State—once lauded for its expansive public record laws—from scrutiny. As Reason reported yesterday, two other bills advancing through the Legislature would ban cities and counties from forming civilian police oversight boards.

State Rep. Chuck Brannan (R–Macclenny) filed House Bill 1605 and House Bill 1607 earlier this month. The former would expand the definition of “crime victims” to include “law enforcement officers, correctional officers, or correctional probation officers who use deadly force in the course and scope of their employment or official duties.” 

The latter would exempt records that could be used to identify and harass crime victims from the state’s public records law unless the victim opts to have it disclosed. “The Legislature finds that the release of any such information or records that could be used to locate or harass a crime victim or the victim’s family could subject such victims or their families to further trauma,” the bill says.

The bills have the backing of powerful police unions in the state as well. “For people to exclude police officers just because we wear the badge and we protect and serve, that’s not fair to us,” John Kazanjian, president of the Florida Police Benevolent Association, told the Tampa Bay Times. 

Keep reading

FAMILIES OF PEOPLE KILLED BY NYPD BRACE FOR ERIC ADAMS TO VETO CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM BILLS

A SMALL GROUP OF organizers rallied outside of New York City Hall on Wednesday to call on Mayor Eric Adams not to veto a series of bills that would ban the use of solitary confinement in city jails and increase oversight over police stops and searches. 

The push by grassroots reform groups to ban solitary confinement comes in response to a surge in recent years of deaths in city jails, including several cases of people who had been detained in solitary confinement. Families of people killed as a result of stops by New York Police Department officers have also urgedOpens in a new tab the mayor to sign the policing measures into law. 

Advocates and officials working on the reforms expect Adams, who has publicly opposedOpens in a new tab the bills, to vetoOpens in a new tab at least two of the measures this week. He has until Friday to do so, or the measures will pass into law. 

The battle pits a pro-police mayor, an NYPD veteran himself, against a progressive City Council, which approvedOpens in a new tab the three billsOpens in a new tab last month by large marginsOpens in a new tab during its last meetingOpens in a new tab of 2023. The fight is the latest in a well-trod pattern of centrist Democrats or Republicans fighting back against popular and democratically enacted welfare reforms. In New York, City Council leaders and members said they have the votes to override the mayor’s veto.

“We are prepared to override the mayor’s veto,” council member Crystal Hudson, who sponsored a bill to strengthen laws around consenting to a search, told The Intercept. “The City Council is the city’s legislative body. The body has spoken.” The council would have 30 days from a mayoral veto to issue an override. 

Keep reading

Dexter Wade, buried without his family’s knowledge, had ID on him with his home address, lawyer says

An independent pathologist examining the newly exhumed body of Dexter Wade — the Mississippi man killed by police and buried in a pauper’s grave without his mother’s knowledge — found a wallet with a state identification card that included the address of a home he shared with his mother, the family’s lawyer said Thursday.

The pathologist, Frank Peretti, reported that he found the wallet in the front pocket of Wade’s jeans and that it contained his state identification card with his home address, along with a credit card and a health insurance card, attorney Ben Crump said in a statement.

Crump, who arranged for the independent autopsy, said he was sharing Peretti’s initial findings. NBC News has not seen the full autopsy report.

A representative of Crump’s confirmed that the home address was the same as his mother’s, Bettersten Wade. She reported her 37-year-old son missing on March 14, nine days after he was struck by a police cruiser as he was crossing a highway.

She got no information from police about what happened to him until Aug. 27, when she learned that he’d been killed less than an hour after he had left his house and buried in a pauper’s field owned by Hinds County.

Keep reading

Off-duty cop killed witness trying to assist police at scene of shooting who ‘did not present a threat of any kind’: DA

A 37-year-old police officer in Pennsylvania has been indicted by a grand jury for allegedly killing a 48-year-old “good Samaritan” who was attempting to help a shooting victim in a Walmart parking lot last year. Center Township Police Officer John J. Hawk, who was off-duty and dressed in plain clothes at the time of the incident, has been charged with one count each of involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, simple assault, reckless endangerment, and perjury in the death of Kenneth Vinyard, authorities announced.

According to the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office, Vinyard on the night of Nov. 6, 2022, was in the parking lot of a Beaver County Walmart when an individual was shot and the scene became “chaotic.” With the shooter still on the loose, Vinyard “made attempts to show a responding officer something on his telephone that he believed would assist them with the capture of the shooter.”

When Vinyard then interrupted an officer who was speaking to another witness, prosecutors say Hawk placed his hand on Vinyard’s arm and began to physically move him away.

“Vinyard disengaged from Hawk and told Hawk words to the effect of ‘take your hands off me’ but otherwise continued to move backward,” prosecutors wrote in the criminal complaint. “Vinyard did not act aggressively toward Hawk, not make any contact with him. Nevertheless, a few seconds later while the men were standing next to each other, Hawk struck Vinyard in the chest area and simultaneously executed a leg sweep technique which forced Vinyard to fall to the asphalt parking lot and hit his head, He died upon arrival at the hospital.”

Keep reading

A mother reported her son missing in March. Police kept the truth from her for months.

Seven months of searching for her lost son brought Bettersten Wade to a dirt road leading into the woods, past an empty horse stable and a scrapyard.

The last time she’d seen her middle child, Dexter Wade, 37, was on the night of March 5, as he left home with a friend. She reported him missing, and Jackson police told her they’d been unable to find him, she said. 

It wasn’t until 172 excruciating days after his disappearance that Bettersten learned the truth: Dexter had been killed less than an hour after he’d left home, struck by a Jackson police car as he crossed a nearby interstate highway. Police had known Dexter’s name, and hers, but failed to contact her, instead letting his body go unclaimed for months in the county morgue. 

Now it was early October, and Bettersten had finally been told where she could find her son. 

She pulled up to the gates of the Hinds County penal farm, her sister in the passenger seat. A sheriff’s deputy and two jumpsuited inmates in a pickup told her to follow them. 

They bounced down the road and curved into the woods, crawling past clearings where rows of small signs jutted from the earth, each marked with a number.

Keep reading

MOST COPS INVOLVED IN HIGH-PROFILE KILLINGS SINCE 2014 KEPT THEIR POLICE LICENSES

RARELY DOES A new police hire make national headlines. But when Myles Cosgrove got a job at the Carroll County sheriff’s department in northern Kentucky this past April, people had reason to pay attention.

About three years earlier, he and his squad of Louisville police officers had used a battering ram to break into Breonna Taylor’s home during a deadly raid. Investigators later found that Cosgrove was one of three officers who fired their guns. While the Louisville police department ultimately fired Cosgrove for violating use-of-force procedures and not using his body camera, he eluded criminal charges and remains employable as a cop.

That’s because he kept his police certification.

He’s not the only one. Out of 54 officers involved in 14 high-profile killings that spurred Black Lives Matter protests in the last nine years, only 10 had their certifications or licenses revoked as a matter of disciplinary action, according to The Intercept’s analysis of certification documents obtained through public records requests. (Three officers’ disciplinary cases remain pending.) The Intercept’s review begins in 2014 and runs through January of this year. For the first several years of the analysis, none of the officers whose records The Intercept reviewed faced a disciplinary hearing in front of a regulatory board with the power to revoke their license — a bar on being rehired as a cop in most states. That changed after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020. He and three other Minneapolis officers were stripped of their licenses for their involvement in the killing — a turning point in public outrage over police violence, and, perhaps, in formal efforts at accountability.

Keep reading

Colorado police face trial over death of Elijah McClain

Opening statements were due to begin Wednesday in the first of three trials over the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a Black man who was not suspected of any crime when Colorado police confronted him, placed him in a choke hold and called paramedics who gave him a sedative overdose.

McClain, 23, was walking home from a convenience store in the Denver suburb of Aurora on Aug. 24, 2019, when he was stopped by police responding to a report he was acting suspiciously.

No Black jurors were among the 12 and two alternates on the panel chosen during a selection process that began Friday. This first trial involves city of Aurora police officer Randy Roedema and former officer Jason Rosenblatt, who are both charged with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and other charges.

Both men have pleaded not guilty.

After police restrained McClain in a choke hold, he was injected with the powerful sedative ketamine by paramedics, then lapsed into cardiac arrest and died days later at a hospital. All the police and paramedics involved are white.

The McClain case drew national attention following the 2020 killing of George Floyd under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer, which sparked a summer of global protests over the mistreatment of African Americans and other minorities by U.S. law enforcement.

Local prosecutors at first declined to press charges in McClain’s death. But a public outcry prompted Colorado’s governor to order the state attorney general to review the case. A grand jury charged three police officers and two paramedics in a 32-count indictment in September 2021, two years after the killing.

Keep reading