Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project
Fort Worth, TX — An innocent man was shot in the back by police, arrested, charged with assaulting THEM, is now paralyzed for the rest of his life — and police call this justice.
After David Collie watched the video of a Fort Worth police officer assault and arrest an innocent mother and her children who called police after her 7-year-old son was choked by a neighbor, he decided to release the video of his encounter with Fort Worth cops.
“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen from the Fort Worth police officer in that video is not an isolated incident. Many members of our community have been assaulted, handled roughly by Fort Worth police officers,” Collie’s attorney, Nate Washington said. “To be clear, we believe the vast majority of police officers are good and decent people.”
The terrifying video shows police officers pull up to Collie’s apartment complex, get out of their cruiser, and immediately shoot him in the back. One officer is seen holding a blinding flashlight on Collie while another ‘fears for his life’ and squeezes off a round, severing Collie’s spine.
Police were looking for two armed men that night, who allegedly robbed someone they met online to purchase an item. However, Collie did not fit the description, notes his attorney.
According to police, Collie walked away from them and refused their commands to put his hands up. Officers then claim that Collie pulled out a silver box cutter and pointed it at them. Fearing for his life, the Fort Worth police officer shot him in the lower torso, according to the Fort Worth statement.
The video does not show a box cutter.
While Washington agrees that there was a box cutter discovered on the scene — over ten feet from where Collie was shot — he says the police account of Collie threatening cops with it, is fictitious. And, the video backs him up.
When speaking of the video, “I wasn’t there that night. I do know what I saw. I know I never saw this man with a weapon. I never saw this man advance toward the officers. I know I saw him get shot in his back.”
Collie would spend the next two months chained to a hospital bed fighting for his life after police arrested and charged him with aggravated assault on a public servant. When a grand jury heard his case and watched the video, they refused to indict him.
Since the shooting, which happened in July, police haven’t released any of the records on a potential investigation of the officers involved and have kept Collie and his attorney in the dark.
“The process that they ask us to trust is essentially, ‘Let us do what we want to do, we will not be transparent at all, and then we’ll tell you what we concluded,’” Washington said of the police response to an innocent man being paralyzed for the rest of his life after cops wrongly shot him in the back.
“There are conflicting reports in the different city police reports they have written, they have various different narratives and they’re inconsistent,” Washington said.
Collie has yet to file a lawsuit against the Fort Worth police department, but Washington noted they are considering one. He also noted that after they released this video, others began to come forward.
“We’ve gotten calls from attorneys across the city, who said, ‘I have videos as well, I have photographs of what happened to my client,’ and so we’re investigating the culture and the practice of the City of Fort Worth,” Washington said.
“We want justice for David. We want change,” Washington stated, adding, “but we also want peace and calm from the community after they see this video.”
For the rest of his life, David Collie will be in a wheelchair. And, he will have to live with the fact that people who claim to ‘protect society’ put him there.