The officers, who are not in the video at this point, fire multiple shots and McDole falls out of his wheelchair.
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Just steps from the officer-involved shooting, relatives gathered Thursday to remember McDole.
In the video, police demand Jeremy McDole to drop the weapon or show his hands a dozen times.
Seconds after the first officer appears to spot McDole – calling to his fellow officers with “he’s over here!”
An officer who spots McDole shouts: “He’s over here, give me your hands, give me your hands”, before a single shot is fired.
Eyewitness News asked Chief Bobby Cummings what officers saw that we don’t when in regards to McDole and the gun. Then several gunshots can be heard followed by McDole slipping out of his chair and to the ground.
Then McDole comes into view sitting upright in his wheelchair. And cell phone video of the shooting has been recovered. “And this video is showing that he didn’t pull a weapon”, said McDole.
Mike Wilson via YouTube McDole appears wounded in the beginning of the video but it’s not clear how.
The Wilmington Police Department could not be reached on Thursday to provide details or comment, but was quoted in the local News Journal newspaper as saying that officers responded to the area after a caller reported that a man in a wheelchair had shot himself.
He was shot in the back in 2005 and paralysed from the waist down.
Yet Phyllis McDole – who spoke at the same news conference as Cummings, despite their obvious differences of opinion – doesn’t understand why her son died. He also would not say whether he thought the situation should have been handled differently.
The investigators are usually from the fraud division of the Attorney General’s Office and generally don’t have day-to-day interaction with police like employees in the criminal division, said Mullaney, a former U.S. Marshal and Dover Police officer.
“Making a determination about whether a person – including a police officer – should be criminally prosecuted under Delaware law is the responsibility of the Delaware Department of Justice and the department will make that determination following investigation in this case”.
“He was in a wheelchair”, Phyllis McDole said.
“I’m sorry for the officers and family of Jeremy McDole, as this encounter unfortunately ended with the loss of his life”, Cummings said in a statement. “He had a book bag, but I never seen a gun”.
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“It was an execution. I don’t care if he was black, white, whatever”, Smith said. The names of the officers involved have not been released.
