The incident began, according to police, when someone called 911 to say that a man was in the roadway at Northeast 127th Street and 14th Avenue with a gun and was threatening to kill himself.
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John Rivera of the Dade County Police Benevolent Association, which is representing the officer, said the policeman had meant to shoot the patient, believing he posed a danger.
What to even say about this video? “Sit down, Rinaldo. Lay on your stomach, Rinaldo”.
Kinsey told reporters that he was more concerned about his patient’s well being during the incident, because he assumed officers would not shoot him if he had his hands up.
Mobile phone footage shows Mr Kinsey on the ground with his arms in the air, with the young autistic man sitting on the ground nearby playing with a small white toy.
“He has a toy truck”, Kinsey, a black man, tells the officers.
An officer then fired three times, striking Kinsey in the leg, Mr Cuevas said. Charles Kinsey can be heard explaining the situation to the police officers.
“He asked the officer, ‘Why did you shoot me?’ The officer said ‘i don’t know, ‘” Kinsey’s attorney, Hilton Napoleon II, said.
Kinsey was cuffed after the shooting and his nonverbal autistic patient was also taken into police custody.
He was shot anyway.
Kinsey left the hospital Thursday evening.
“I’m like as long as I got my hands up, they’re not going to shoot me”.
“The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating the circumstances related to Tuesday’s police-involved shooting and wounding of Charles Kinsey”, state attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in a statement.
“I realise there are many questions about what happened on Monday night“. Gary Eugene, the city’s police chief, who was appointed to the position just a month before the shooting, said his department was dedicated to an open probe.
“Why did you shoot me?”
Police in North Miami, a city of 62,000 people between Miami and Fort Lauderdale, have offered relatively few details about the encounter.
Two can be seen in the video, peering from behind utility poles about 22 metres away.
“The shooting officer said he didn’t know why he shot him”, Napoleon said, according to NBC Miami.
A witness to the incident said he too tried to warn officers that the autistic man sitting with Kinsey was only holding a toy truck. “However, I want to make it clear, there was no gun recovered”.
On Sunday three police officers were shot dead and three were injured when a black gunman went on the rampage in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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Monday’s shooting comes amid weeks of violence involving police. An officer killed a 32-year-old black man, Philando Castile, at a traffic stop in the midwestern USA state of Minnesota. That shooting, captured on cellphone video, provoked widespread protests about police treatment of the black community.
