“When Mr. McDole began to remove the weapon from his waist, the officers engaged him”, Cummings said.
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The state Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights and Public Trust were in Wilmington on Friday investigating the scene of Wednesday’s incident in which police officers shot to death a man in a wheelchair.
McDole, who had reportedly shot himself in an alleged suicide attempt before the officers arrived, appears to be bleeding. Three more officers, with handguns drawn, appear on the scene and scream at him to drop the gun.
McDole moves around in his wheelchair and reaches into his jeans, but it’s unclear from the video what he is doing.
A national controversy has erupted after a video surfaced online showing cops in Wilmington, Del. opening fire on Jeremy McDole, a man in a wheelchair. The witness who recorded the video notes that McDole is bleeding. As the police were all clearly in front of him, this suggests to me that the reports McDole was already suffering from a self-inflicted wound, and was sitting in his own blood for some time, seems to have merit.
The four police officers involved have been put on leave as an official investigation takes place. The state agency investigates all police shootings that result in injury or death.
The public trust unit was formed by attorney general and former Lt. Gov. Matt Denn in January. The police department’s criminal investigation and professional standards units are also assisting.
“There’s been so many shootings, and every time it comes out it was a justified shooting”, the NAACP’s Richard Smith told the AP.
“We can not continue having all our folks being shot and nobody held accountable”.
A DOJ spokesman declined to respond to Smith’s call for a special prosecutor. “Every time there was a shooting, it came back [a] justified shooting”.
“From what I see, they handled it in a justified manor”, he said.
I’m sure we’re going to have some armchair analysts asking why McDole wasn’t tased, and the simple answer to that question is that you don’t respond to a lethal force threat with a less lethal response like a taser or a chemical spray.
McDole was paralyzed from the waist down after he was shot in the back about 10 years ago and was living at the Hillside Center nursing home said McDole’s great uncle, Vincent Smith.
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Jeremy McDole had past convictions in connection with drugs and disorderly conduct, and incurred a probation violation last November. Officers recovered a.38-caliber handgun they found beside the man, police claim.
