The Muskogee, Oklahoma Police Department released the video from a fatal on-duty police shooting (scroll down for video). The whole thing was captured by an officer’s body camera, and what it shows is horrifying.
Officer Chansey McMillin can be seen shooting and killing 21-year-old Terence D. Walker. The only observable reason why he as shot was for running from police who confronted him.
The video documents what otherwise might have been in dispute, that Officer McMillin fired five shots at Walker when the suspect stopped to pick up an item he dropped while running away.
Watch the complete 9 min. video of the shooting below…
“I was in a bad spot,” McMillin said to an officer at four minutes and forty seconds into the video.
Sgt. Mike Mahan said that he believed the suspect was firing at people, and that he had to shoot to defend drivers and innocent passersby. The local news source Tulsa World writes the following:
In the video, a responding officer retrieves an item from Walker’s crumpled body and tosses it to the side, motioning for McMillin to pick it up. McMillin later states that it’s a handgun, and another officer notes that it’s loaded.
Six minutes into a video, the nearby church’s pastor who had tried to attend to Walker’s body immediately after the shooting, tells officers that McMillin “followed procedures … he did everything right.”
A minute later, a shaken McMillin rests against another officer’s vehicle. An officer approaches and consoles McMillin, taking him north from the scene to a squad car.
“Why’d (Walker) have to do that?” McMillin asks.
Walker, Sgt. Mike Mahan said, had threatened his ex-girlfriend repeatedly throughout the day, telling her that he “had a bullet with his name on it.” The woman was inside the church when Walker arrived, and police arrived shortly thereafter.
“When officers got there, they asked to talk to (Walker,)” Mahan said. “A (female) witness said that he had tried to hand her a gun, but she wouldn’t take it. When officers began to pat (Walker) down, they felt the gun, and he started to run away.”
Walker’s autopsy report is pending, but state medical examiner’s office spokeswoman Amy Elliot said he was shot three times, with wounds to the neck and torso.
In Oklahoma, having a gun is not a crime in and of itself. If the suspect was fleeing, he was clearly not a threat to the officer. The gun is irrelevant to that issue, as a gun on the person of a man who is running away is not a threat to you and cannot in and of itself serve as justification for the use of lethal force since possession of it is not in an of itself a crime.
But all this talk about the law has fallen on deaf ears. Officer McMillin has been placed on paid administrative leave. This is the second shooting he has been involved in. The city seems oblivious to what is apparently a pattern of over-reaction by the officer.
Source: http://truthfight.com/cop-records-shooting-man-running-away/