Prosecutors charged Shelby Thursday with first degree manslaughter.
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Shelby’s background has come under scrutiny following the Tulsa County district attorney’s decision to charge her in the deadly shooting, which was caught on video from a fellow officer’s dashboard camera, as well as in footage shot by a police helicopter that had been circling overhead. But other video footage shows Crutcher walking away from Shelby and toward his SUV with his arms in the air.
In a court filing, the Tulsa district attorney’s chief investigator Doug Campbell said Crutcher was shot when reaching into his car’s driver’s side front window.
According to documents released by the sheriff’s office, Shelby, 42, was mentioned in a November 2010 use of force report when she was among a group of officers who entered a home with guns drawn in an attempt to serve a felony warrant. Later, police said they uncovered PCP in his auto, which coincides with Shelby’s suspicions. She now faces charges of first degree manslaughter.
According to The Huffington Post, Shelby is now married to another Tulsa cop named Dave Shelby, however, prior to this union she was married and then divorced from someone else. Tensions became so strained between Shelby and her former husband that her children’s step-mother filed an order of protection against Shelby in 2002. A private wake is also planned for Crutcher, who was fatally shot September 16 by Officer Betty Shelby.
Betty Shelby, a native of Poteau, Oklahoma, studied biology at Northeastern State University before signing up for the Oklahoma Air National Guard in 1999, according to NBC News. Shelby wrote on her application that the order had been denied after the judge “saw that (she) was not guilty of the accusations”, the news station reported. Shelby argued that her ex-husband’s new wife only filed the order to discredit Shelby’s character in the custody hearing.
In two videos provided by Tulsa police, Crutcher can be seen with his hands in the air shortly before he was shot. A man inside a police helicopter says: “That looks like a bad dude, too”.
In the same document that revealed her previous domestic disputes to the Tulsa Police Department, Shelby also admitted that she had smoked marijuana socially when she was 18 years old. The Joneses were victims of a burglary and Officer Shelby had responded. They released the videos, one of which was taken from a police helicopter and the other from a dashboard camera in a patrol auto, in a bid for transparency. That excessive force complaint was later considered unfounded and before killing Crutcher, Shelby had no serious disciplinary action on her record.
Shelby is now a trained drug-recognition expert and she claimed to believe that Crutcher was under the influence when she engaged with him.
At that point, Shelby pulled out her service weapon and followed Crutcher to the vehicle. She surrendered to authorities early Friday and was released after she posted $50,000 bond.
Shelby is now on administrative leave from the Tulsa Police Department and could face up to four years in prison if convicted of manslaughter.
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Following widespread public outcry in the wake of the shooting, Shelby left Tulsa because she was receiving death threats, her lawyer, Scott Wood, told CBS affiliate KOTV.
