“It appeared to the officers that the white male was trying to do harm to Mr. Kinsey”, Rivera said.
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“This wasn’t a mistake in the sense that the officer shot the wrong guy or he thought that Kinsey was the bad guy”, Mr Rivera told CNN.
“I’m like this right here, and when he shot me, it was so surprising”, Kinsey tells Channel 7.
He also questioned why Kinsey was handcuffed after he was shot.
Kinsey’s attorney, Hilton Napoleon, provided a cellphone video to the Herald on Wednesday taken moments before the shooting.
Cuevas said an officer then fired three times, hitting Kinsey in the leg. He complies fully with police orders.
They acted “with that threat in mind”, Eugene said. The officer is now on administrative leave during the investigation.
The officer’s name has not been released, but he will probably be hailed a hero for trying to protect the caretaker, maybe even receive an award. “I did what I had to do in a split second to accomplish that and hate to hear others paint me as something I am not”.
Police said they were responding to an emergency call about a man with a gun walking around and threatening suicide.
The officers, he said, grabbed rifles from the patrol cars’ trunks and crept toward the men. “However, I want to make it clear, there was no gun recovered”. In the video, Kinsey can be heard shouting to police: “All he has is a toy truck”. He said he tried to explain the situation to officers.
“All he has is a toy truck in his hands”.
“He’s traumatized by that”, Clinton Bower, who runs the group home Kinsey works for, said referring to the autistic man. He would not say who gave him the video.
The man beside him rocks back and forth.
Kinsey said of the 23-year-old, “I was more anxious about him than myself”.
“And I am laying down here just like this, and I’m telling them again, ‘Sir, there is no need for firearms”.
“He said, ‘I don’t know'”. It later transpired he had posted videos complaining at police treatment of African Americans and urging them to “fight back”.
America has been rocked by protests over police killings since the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 19-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Kinsey also is black.
Gabriel Pendas, 33, a lone protester outside the police station on Thursday held a sign that read, “STOP shooting black people”.
Following those two deaths, 10 law enforcement officers were fatally shot in attacks in Dallas, Baton Rouge and in a MI courthouse. After the state agency completes their investigation, prosecutors will decide if they will press charges. An investigation is ongoing with the assistance of the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, the department said. Authorities are investigating the shooting.
Charles Kinsey, 47, said it felt like a “mosquito bite”.
“I couldn’t allow this to continue for the community’s sake”, Rivera said Thursday during a hastily called news conference.
The North Miami officer has yet to be named, but has been described as a 30-year-old Hispanic man that has been with the police department for four years, according to N.Y. Daily News.
“At some point during the negotiation, one of the responding officers discharged his weapon”. They said the officer, who has not been identified, is on administrative leave according to standard procedures.
“There are many questions about what happened on Monday night“, he said. I, personally, have questions. “I assure you well will get all the answers”. As Kinsey had advised, no weapon was found, and the autistic man, the only person with anything in his hands, was not injured.
The shooting, while not fatal, is being scrutinized as another example of excessive use of force by police against unarmed black men.
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The shooting of behavior therapist Charles Kinsey on Monday was caught on a witness’s cellphone video and went viral Thursday.
