As soon as Noble’s truck is parked, an officer is heard yelling: “Turn off the truck”. Police initially showed the footage to his family but declined to release it to the public pending completion of its investigation of the shooting, according to The Guardian. Watch the NSFW video (below) and decide for yourself. The entire time this is going on, officers are yelling at Noble to put his hands in the air. “However, I believe this video is also going to raise questions in the minds of people, just as those questions exist in my mind as well”.
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While the footage heightens the debate over body-worn cameras and if their recordings should be made public – a move that law enforcement agencies strongly oppose – it also opens the discussion about how the mentally ill and depressed are treated by the police.
When Noble refused, an officer fired two rounds, hitting the teen in the abdomen. When he was unable to do so, they shot him one more time.
He starts walking towards the police but after just seconds one of the officers fires two shots.
As he lay on the ground, Noble appeared to reach at his waist for something and is shot by the same officer a third time.
After Noble pulled his auto over, he got out of the vehicle and was shot four times, including two times while he was lying on the ground.
The body camera video shows the officers pulling over Noble at gas station.
The video’s release came as President Barack Obama said the United States is “not even close” to where it needs to be in bridging the divide between police and the communities they serve. A criminal and an internal affairs investigation are ongoing, he said.
There, the video shows, Noble disregarded increasingly frantic commands from the officers, one of whom had drawn his weapon and pointed it over the steering wheel while he was still driving his squad auto.
According to Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer, officers had been responding to a report of a man armed with a rifle.
While protests for Castile and Sterling’s deaths have sprung up and prompted renewed calls for police reform, the response to Noble’s death was much more localized to the Fresno area.
“I do not have the answer for that today”, he said at a press conference Wednesday, when asked if he thought the shooting was justified. This prompted one officer to shoot him with a handgun and another officer to shoot him with a shotgun.
The father of an unarmed 19-year-old man shot and killed by police in Fresno, California, seeks payment from the city for his son’s death.
The shooting prompted a protest in front of the Fresno County Jail on Wednesday by more than a hundred demonstrators, including Black Lives Matter, the activist group that has organized numerous protests in cities nationally in the wake of the police-involved killings of blacks.
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The Noble family’s claim for unspecified damages, filed on Monday on behalf of his mother Veronica Nelson, argues that officers “never had an objectively reasonable basis to shoot” the 19-year-old.
