His family’s lawyer, Lee Merritt, summed it up.
They have a dead child, they have the identity of the shooter, and they have no explanation for the shooting.
A 15-year-old boy, leaving a party that had gotten out of hand, is dead. They couldn’t find a bad thing to say about him, an excuse, a story, a lie, to turn this great kid into someone less than worthy of our concern. By all accounts, he was just a great young man.
Jordan, a popular football player, was killed shortly after leaving a party with a group of friends on Saturday night.
The cops responded to a 911 call about drunken kids at a party, and the story is that they heard gunfire from an “unknown altercation.” That’s about as close as it will get to explaining why one officer was so filled with fear and loathing that it was more important that he fire blindly than risk any chance that a bullet might strike him.
The original story was the best they could do.
Balch Springs Police Chief Jonathan Haber originally said the car backed up toward responding officers “in an aggressive manner.”
The description, “an aggressive manner,” is as vague and lame as any they could have invented. The barest hint of a threat, without any detail to suggest any actual risk upon which to justify a police officer shooting blindly at the car in which Jordan was a passenger. Toss in a provocative adjective and the people who want to believe that cops are their saviors will believe. And what judge has the guts to dismiss such a claim, no matter how devoid of meaning it may be?
“There were no weapons involved; there was no aggressive behavior; these were not suspects,” Mr. Merritt said in a telephone interview. “The lone motive they had for the murder was that the vehicle was being used as a weapon, and now that is no longer there.”
Then came the correction. The car wasn’t backing up aggressively toward the officer, such that he was constrained to fire to save his life.
After his original statement, however, Haber said that he “misspoke.” He clarified that the car was in fact driving away from officers, not toward them.
There was nothing. Not even a hint of a justification. No threat to the cop. Not even an arguable reason to be afraid, no less shoot. But still, he shot.
He added, “After reviewing video, I don’t believe that it [the shooting] met our core values.”
Good to know, but not of much use to a dead boy.
The shooting has unnerved Balch Springs, a city of about 23,000 people that lies about 15 miles east of downtown Dallas. The Mesquite Independent School District said Mr. Edwards “was a good student who was very well liked by his teachers, coaches and his fellow students.”
“The entire district — especially the staff and students of Mesquite High School — are mourning this terrible loss,” the district said.
Chris Cano, whose son played football with Jordan, told a local television station, WFAA, that he was a “great kid.”
“Awesome parents,” Mr. Cano said. “He was not a thug. This shouldn’t happen to him.”
There is no reason that Cano should have to defend Jordan Edwards, to explain that “he was not a thug.” Why would he be? Why does a victim of a needless killing have to defend the value of his life? If he was a thug, this shouldn’t have happened to him. But he was no thug, and there is no reason why anyone, anyone at all, should have to even consider suggesting such a thing.
“He was excellent — 3.5 G.P.A., never in trouble, no attendance issues,” Mr. Fleener said. “He was a kid that did everything right.”
The bullet doesn’t care whether its target did everything right. The person who pulls the trigger should.
This wasn’t a murder. The cop, whose name is concealed because they can, and because they take care of their own far better than they will ever take care of your child, didn’t want to kill Jordan Edwards. He didn’t want to kill someone. He didn’t have a purpose of killing. Not exactly, anyway.
Fear of the unknown but distant potential threat? Anger that a car was driving away and might be the perps he was after, that the passengers in that car were making his job more difficult even though they had no reason in the world to know he was there, no less think they were annoying him? Maybe he was just a bit on the crazy side, too eager to shoot.
There are usually stories to be concocted to explain why a cop killed when there was no reason to do so. Just as there are believers on the side that no shoot is righteous, there are believers that no shoot isn’t. They will impute some benign purpose to turn an outrageous, needless killing into a sad and tragic story that couldn’t be helped. The cop made a mistake, but it was an honest one, a fair one. After all, was he supposed to do nothing and violate the First Rule of Policing?
Officer Pedro Gonzalez, a police spokesman, said in a brief phone interview early Monday that the officers involved in the episode had been wearing body cameras. Mr. Gonzalez said they would be interviewed after they had been given a chance to “decompress.”
Who gives a damn whether the cops have a chance to “decompress”? And if they happen to come up with a story to match the video from their body cams, well, maybe there’s still a chance they can find a way out. Either way, a great kid is dead at the hand of a cop. The cop’s feelings really don’t matter at the moment. The cop is alive. Jordan Edwards is dead.
“decompress” = ensure their stories align to preserve whatever narrative is chosen going forward.
I once witnessed an arrest – the arrestee was roughed up a bit and once in handcuffs told the arresting officer there would be brutality charges filed.
The officer simply paused, looked at the arrestee and said, “it doesn’t matter what you say. We will write whatever we need in the arrest report to make it stick.”
It’s good of you to explain to criminal defense lawyers and judges how it works. Who would have guessed?
No need to be rude, though.
Putting aside the hubris of the random anon commenter presuming to tone police me on my blawg, there is a need. This isn’t reddit. This isn’t a place for people to restate the obvious, the simplistic. because they have some need to express themselves. I choose not to allow the comments to my posts on my blawg to become a soapbox for simpletons, and so I make it uncomfortable for people who have nothing informative or, at the least, humorous, to offer to comment. So yes, there is a need. You just lack the capacity to grasp it, despite your presumptuousness to scold me for not being as nice as you feel I ought to be.
See what I did there? I didn’t think you would.
So, this will likely be another one of those cases where the officer defends the criminal charge by claiming that he subjectively perceived something other than reality when firing on the car full of kids.
Time will tell. This is going to be a very hard one, and the best defense at the moment is to keep things as quiet as possible and wait until the next shiny squirrel distracts people.
They may have gotten it already. Some psycho lured and ambushed an EMT in Dallas yesterday.
There’s always another shiny squirrel.
It was a rifle shot that killed Edward according to the local paper’s report on the autopsy.
Fair enough. Does this change anything?
It takes longer to get out the patrol rifle, and they are more accurate than a handgun. It’s a detail a lot of the local media focused on since it’s inconsistent with a quick reaction.
It suggests he got out of the patrol car armed to bear, as there’s no way he got out, saw a car, went back for a rifle, since the car would already be gone. But is that really the question at this point? Or is there an obsession with quasi-relevant background details to fill some gestalt need?
“…is there an obsession with quasi-relevant background details to fill some gestalt need?”
Well, yeah, kinda… The human brain/mind is always looking for patterns. (Anthropologists say it was the high level of abstract pattern recognition that was key to our survival as a species. — e.g., the ability to anticipate danger). When the brain/mind tries to make sense of the senseless, finding no rational interpretation of the known details, it starts desperately grasping at straws to try and resolve the cognitive dissonance. Faced with a vacuum of known, rational details (or a surplus of irrational ones) it will start to draw irrational/implausible inferences out of thin air. (Aristotle: ‘Horror vacui’).
Put another way, everyone feels obliged to take a wild-ass-guess as to the minute details of the incident, as though it will then somehow make perfect sense.
The above described mechanism helps account for you having to *prove* to a jury that your client is innocent, even when no credible evidence has been presented by the prosecution, and in spite of repeated reminders that they are “innocent until proven guilty”. (Although, I suspect you are all too well aware of this 😉
In some individuals, when an inherent limiting mechanisms fails to truncate such obsessive thought patterns, it’s considered a primary indicator for one type of schizophrenia. (It’s the human equivalent of a CPU’s divide-by-zero error).
As to gestalt, sometime back in the 70’s, a well known author/psychiatrist was addressing an annual meeting of gestalt therapists in Vienna. He walks up to the podium and reads a poem, then walks out. For almost a minute, the room is silent. Then it erupts in applause. The content of that poem:
“Like a women perfumes her farts, I’m a man of many arts. I am what I am, I screw when I can, I’m Popeye the sailor man”.
(Sorry, it was late and the above is what happens with too much caffeine and too little sleep — I’ll show myself out. )
There are two skills that are almost always found in good lawyers. One is tolerance for ambiguity. The other is the ability to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, and automatically dismiss the irrelevant. We’re okay with the idea that, at the end of the day, we’ll still not know “the truth,” and the irrelevant factoids need not be forced into the equation just because they’re there.
Then again, I am moved by the poem, too. Deeply.
Makes me wonder why the police officer was carrying and pointing a long gun at a vehicle. What prompted him to believe that type of weapon was necessary for the situation? Or did he have a new toy he wanted to use and did not care on whom it got used?
Does the fact that the kid was shot with a rifle change anything? It’s hard to say for certain, without knowing the background of the shooter, but I would say that it’s possible.
While I am not a lawyer, guns and their use is a topic that I know a few things about. I’d never cut it as an expert witness, the way say, Massad Ayoob is, but my knowledge goes beyond the general run of range rats and hunters.
There’s a saying amongst enthusiasts and professional gun-users (A police officer’s more a professional gun-carrier, but the Venn overlap’s hard to determine) that ‘a pistol’s what you carry when you’re not expecting trouble. When you expect trouble, you bring a long arm.’ If and to what extent that applies can’t currently be determined.
Having said that, the primary differences between pistols and rifles are range and accuracy, once the weapon is in hand and ready for use. Despite they way fiction portrays pistols, if the target’s more than 20′ away, hitting the target’s more a matter of luck than anything else, in a non-range situation. At ranges under the length of a residential block, the use of a rifle makes it plausible that the shooter was deliberately trying to hit a human in the car. It also makes claims that the shooter was aiming for, say, the tires less plausible, as the point of aim for that as opposed to the passengers is quite different.
However, the ability of the shooter is a factor. As demonstrated by the officer who shot the caretaker instead of the mental patient with the toy truck, using a rifle does not necessarily mean the shooter is competent with it.
Short answer is that if the victim had been shot with a pistol, intent to kill is not implied as strongly as it is with a rifle, and the possibility that the officer was just shooting wildly and the kid was hit due to bad luck is considerably higher.
While typing this, I’ve been debating with myself as to the relevance of what I’m saying, as it doesn’t really answer the question, but my final determination is that the things I’ve brought up shouldn’t make anyone dumber, and may make someone smarter. If I am incorrect on either point, by all means moderate this post away.
I’m not sure your penultimate paragraph is right; preparing for a fight isn’t the same as fighting. That said, your final paragraph said what I might have said.
Two points that I think need clarification.
First, by “trouble”, the expression means “the need to shoot other people”, not fistfights.
And second, , stripping away everything else that I said, the difference comes down to mindset to the extent that the expected behavior is “point and shoot”, while with a rifle, the expected behavior is “aim and shoot”.
As for your final sentence, thank you for the tummy rub. I am here to learn, and try to be a good student to the extent of keeping my mouth shut unless I have something relevant to add. I will take the comment to mean roughly ‘so far, so good”, but not perfect.
I understood what you meant. You assume too much. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but that you can’t get there without more information that’s unavailable and may never be available.
Sure. The officer has more unexpended pistol ammunition than he otherwise would have.
I can understand Barney wanting to save his bullet for later, but where’d he find the rifle?
“There are usually stories to be concocted to explain why a cop killed when there was no reason to do so.” There it is, the elephant herd roaming in our cities. It seems to me the burden of taming the rogue elephant(s) is up to their own.
Elephants? Why do you want to endanger elephants? It’s for the ivory, isn’t it?
There’s an “Ebony and Ivory” joke in there somewhere, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Had a police officer been shot and killed, the suspect’s photo and name would be all over the media.
In this case, the blue curtain has been drawn to protect this person from the consequences of their action…it’s enough to make me agree with my minarchist friends…
Okay.
The question in my mind is, what do we do to prevent the next such senseless shooting? Do we make an example of the cop? Mandate better selection and training for peace officers?
I just wish I knew.
You assume there is (a) something to be done, and (b) we can do it. Neither of these assumptions is necessarily valid.
IMO, which means nothing here – unless and until there is a breach in the blue wall and the power structure (chiefs and unions) demand a new paradigm, nothing will change.
There are pockets of change, but you’re right, they have to come from within. There was, for a brief and shining moment, a good chance to push the power structure to move more quickly, more forcefully, at the outset of BLM when it was about killing black men in the street. And then it was gone. But I’ve explained all this before.
I wish I could argue against you point. 🙁
When in doubt, just ask the ABA House of Delegates to pass a Resolution. They will, you know. If you ask.
“Inexplicably” ?
There you go again using words you don’t mean.
At least somebody gets me.
Happy to report that this happened:
“Police Chief Fires Officer Who Shot And Killed Black Texas Teenager”
(NPR article title)
‘Attorneys for the family, Lee Merritt and Jasmine Crockett, praised the police department for its quick action to fire the officer.
“No other city has moved at the rate Balch Springs has,” Crockett told The Associated Press on Tuesday night. “It’s just unbelievable. It’s absolutely unbelievable that a department did what a department should do.”
“Upon determining that the assistant manager of Dairy Queen was the killer, he was immediately fired.”
“Attorneys for the family praised Dairy Queen for its quick action to fire the assistant manager.”
Color me unimpressed. Now, had the cop been cuffed as he was informed of his discharge, well…
Being charged w/ murder; expected to surrender this eve.
Better late than never.
Indeed. Former officer, Roy D. Oliver II, 37, to be charged with murder.
I heard he’s pissed that there wasn’t a shiny squirrel around when he needed one. But hey, the shiny squirrels can’t be everywhere, right?
Some days, not even a shiny squirrel will do. Hopefully, this is one of those days.