“If there was an epidemic of white, college-age men being shot and killed by police officers something would have been done by now and their murderers would have been indicted and jailed for their crimes”, said one woman participating in the protests. “Would this have happened if those passengers, the driver and the passengers, were white?” “They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too numerous communities they serve”, he said in a statement on Facebook.
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The first one happened Tuesday night in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when a man was outside a store selling CDs.
Overnight, as word of Castile’s death spread, a large group of people gathered at the scene of the shooting and then moved to the governor’s mansion in nearby St. Paul.
“He was never a bad man”, Reynolds said of her fiance.
A person who appeared to be an armed police officer stood at the car’s window.
Castile was driving the auto, with Reynolds riding beside him. “He was loving. So even for the police to take him away, nothing within his body language said intimidation, nothing within his body said, ‘Shoot me.’ Nothing within his body language said, ‘Kill me, I want to be dead'”.
Zuckerberg did not address the “glitch” that briefly removed the video from Reynolds’ Facebook page Wednesday night, though it may have been temporarily flagged for graphic content.
A Jacksonville mother of five said she is sick of gun violence after two police-involved shootings this week.
“Please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him”, said Reynolds as she recorded on her cell phone.
The deaths have sparked fresh demonstrations in the USA and President Barack Obama said on Thursday that the killings were “an American issue that we should all care about”.
Clarence Castile spoke to the Star Tribune from the Hennepin County Medical Center, where he said his nephew died minutes after arriving. Police said he had been placed on paid administrative leave.
The Facebook footage shows Castile lying motionless in the auto for several minutes, his shirt covered in blood, while Reynolds speaks calmly to the camera. “Cops fed him four bullets”. The officer can be heard saying, “I told him not to reach for it”.
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“Oh, he could really transform a room”, Dickinson said, “And I thought, ‘Wow, what a great role model.’ I was just happy to see him in school”. “And the officer just shot him in his arm”. “I did so that the world knows that these police are not here to protect us”, she said. “It’s OK, I’m right here with you”.
