A black man fatally shot by a white Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer responding to a stalled vehicle had no weapon on him or in his SUV, the city’s police chief said Monday.
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Video shows Terence Crutcher walking to his SUV and a female officer following him in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The 40-year-old man is standing away from the officers on the drivers’ side of his vehicle when one officer fires a stun gun and another fires a single, fatal shot.
The Justice Department has begun a parallel investigation into possible civil rights charges related to Crutcher’s death, U.S. Attorney Danny Williams, Sr., said Monday.
Dashcam video released today shows a Tulsa police officer responding to a call at 7:43 p.m. on Friday. Someone on the police radio says, “I think he may have just been tasered”. Video shows Crutcher walking toward the tan SUV with his hands in the air as an officer follows with her gun drawn. Seconds later a single shot was sacked from the officer.
Terence Crutcher was shot and killed by police in Tulsa., Okla., Friday, in a case that has prompted a Justice Department investigation.
“He was not approached because we suspected of having committed a crime”.
Forty-year-old Terence Crutcher’s vehicle broke down in the middle of the road on Friday.
Crutcher’s sister Tiffany said that she lost her brother “because of the negligence, and the incompetency, and insensitivity and because he was a ‘big, bad dude, ‘” reports the Tulsa World.
At a separate news conference, Damario Solomon-Simmons, an attorney for Crutcher’s family, said the department’s claim that Crutcher died at the hospital was not true.
‘That big bad dude was a son. That big “bad dude” was a father.
Tulsa police now do not carry body cameras, so it is unlikely any additional footage of the shooting will be forthcoming. It’s the latest in nearly 400 police killings of black men in the USA since the start of 2015.
On the night of September 16, exactly one month later, Crutcher’s SUV broke down, according to his family.
Shelby joined the Tulsa Police Department in December 2011. “My impression is the video I saw is among the worst that we have seen nationally”, Ray Owens, a pastor at a local church, told Mic. He says Shelby opened fire and another officer used a stun gun when Crutcher’s “left hand goes through the vehicle window”.
About a dozen people gathered outside the Tulsa courthouse to protest the shooting. Another fired her weapon, killing Crutcher.
He is representing Mr Crutcher’s family, just as he did relatives of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black Florida teenager who was fatally shot by a neighbourhood watch volunteer in 2012.
“I want to assure our community and I want to assure all of you and people across the nation watching this: We will achieve justice”.
“We ask for facts, we ask for answers, and we clearly got it through the video and we are devastated”, she said.
He said Tulsa police drew their own conclusions about Crutcher. “We did not see Terence attacking the officers”.
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Chuck Jordan, Tulsa’s chief of police, described the footage as “very disturbing and hard to watch”.
