One officer, now identified as Jonathan Aledda, opened fire, striking Kinsey in the leg. However, according to police, Rios was the intended target and Aledda simply missed and hit Kinsey.
Advertisement
Spring also gave a telephone number for residents to call if they have information on the case, and said that North Miami police will be out in the community visiting residents and churches this weekend.
The officers who encountered Kinsey and his patient on Monday were responding to an emergency call about an armed man threatening suicide, police said in a statement.
Bystander video shows Kinsey lying in the street with his hands up shortly before the shooting.
In dispatch audio obtained by CBS Miami, an officer is heard saying “He’s loading up his weapon”, apparently referring to the autistic man who was holding a toy truck.
Aledda shot Charles Kinsey, a healthcare worker, who was helping a man with autism after he wandered away from the MACtown group home where Kinsey worked.
Kinsey is hospitalized with a gunshot wound to his right leg after two or three shots were fired, according to his attorney.
“As your mayor of this great city of North Miami, I can assure you that we will go wherever the truth takes us”, he said.
John Rivera, president of the Police Benevolent Association in Dale County said that the officer thought Kinsey’s life was in danger, NBC News reported. When he got shot, Kinsey was in complete shock.
Kinsey’s attorney, Hilton Napoleon said, Thursday morning, “There is no justification for shooting an unarmed person who is talking to you and telling you that they don’t have a gun and that they’re a mental health counselor”.
Pastor Kinsey said his nephew was handcuffed and left lying in the street for 20 minutes until an ambulance arrived. Rivera says, officers didn’t know the object was a toy. Matthews says he tried to tell an officer who had stayed behind for crowd control, but she told him to back up.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating the case along with the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.
Napoleon said that Kinsey was physically “doing OK”.
“Sometimes police officers make mistakes, because at the end of the day they are not computers”, Rivera told reporters Thursday night. Kinsey was sent to calm him down and bring him back.
It is the latest in a long string of incidents of excessive police force being used against an unarmed black man being caught on video and going viral.
North Miami has a population of about 60,000 people, which is still considerably smaller than the city of Miami or Miami Beach.
Police need to acknowledge this feeling among African-American men and work to find a solution, said Chuck Drago, a white former police chief in Oviedo, Florida. This most recent incident is one of many where police officers are accused of shooting or injuring black men without justification.
“This is like a nightmare to me”, Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson said. When questioned about the incident, Holland reportedly told investigators that he was not at the scene when the incident occurred. The Miami police department should accept accountability and then and ONLY then will we feel someone hears us. This is not the case of a police abuse.
The shooting she said, isn’t typical of the city, which she described as a “melting pot”. “The officers, realizing and believing that there was a firearm – many officers thought the white male had a firearm”.
Advertisement
So obviously they knew they had screwed up.
