Any Excuse To Kill

A long-form piece of investigative journalism by Brad Schrade at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution details the murder of a young mother, Carolyn Small, whose bad day turned far worse at the hands of Glynn County, Georgia, police officers, Sgt. Robert C. Sasser and Officer Michael T. Simpson.

While the article takes the story from inception through the ultimate machinations used to sanitize the cops from culpability, and each piece of the sordid story is a story within itself, the beginning is a fascinating place to focus on the separation of “us and them,” the dehumanization that allows cops to murder a human being without any apparent twinge of concern.

Not that it makes it worse, but that it removes one aspect from the mix: Carolyn Small was a white, attractive, young mother.  Glynn County cops were called to investigate a “suspicious person.”

The bloodshed began as a simple call to the police of a suspicious person.

Earlier that day, someone spotted Small sitting in her car at a local shopping mall and called police because they thought she might be doing drugs.

When a Glynn County officer approached and asked her to turn off the engine and step outside her car, Small ignored him and drove away.

Small had issues.

She had struggled for years with drug and alcohol addiction as well as mental health problems.

Her divorce had finalized just days before the shooting. Her ex-husband, Keith Small, said he loved his wife and remembers her as a caring mother to their daughter, Aniliese, who was 3 when her mother was killed, and an older daughter from a previous relationship.

His wife had relapsed in the months leading up to the shooting and been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociative Disorder.

But that doesn’t mean Small gets a pass on fleeing the police, though her flight wasn’t particularly flighty.

An expanding posse of patrol vehicles, sirens blaring, tried to stop her as she drove around the mall parking lot. Leaving the mall, Small drove four miles through Brunswick, never exceeding 35 mph.

More Keystone Cops than fleeing felon, but even a low speed chase is a chase. So they shot out her tires and finally bumped her car to spin it into a utility pole.

In the video, the chase ends when Trooper Malone, leading the pursuit, bumps the rear of the Buick and it spins to a stop. Sasser quickly positions his Glynn County police car on her front bumper, essentially confining her between the utility pole and his car and the state trooper’s vehicle.

There was a small space between the pole behind and the cruiser in front, enough that Small could move her car slightly forward and back.  How much?  Well, there’s dash cam video.  She wasn’t going anywhere.  But then, that wasn’t really the concern Sasser and Simpson had on their mind at that moment.

“Let me get out there and get her out,” Malone calls out to the other officers, according to the GBI audio transcripts.

“Hold on, hold on,” one unknown officer responds.

“If she moves the car, I’m going to shoot her,” Simpson says.

Moments later gunfire erupts and Small is hit by police bullets.

Maybe they don’t get much opportunity to shoot in Glynn County.  There was ample opportunity to take her out of the car without further incident, as Trooper Malone was about to do until warned off so he wasn’t in the line of Simpson’s fire.  There was no chance she was going to get away.  But there was room for the slightest movement, and that was all the cops needed.

After the shooting, Sasser and Simpson are heard on video discussing the shoot.

“Where did you hit her?” Simpson asks, according to a GBI transcript.

“I hit her right in the face,” Sasser says.

“I watched the bridge of her nose…I pulled the trigger and I watched it hit her at the same time I think I fired,” Simpson says.

Oh wait, that wasn’t the piece where they explained why they had no option but to shoot.  This is:

Within hours of the shooting, Chief Doering had formed his own opinion of what happened. Based on witness statements and dash cam video, Doering told local reporters that his preliminary review led him to believe that the officers’ feared their lives were in danger and that they acted appropriately.

The next day’s news headline backed him up: “Woman shot trying to run down police.”

Luckily, no officer was hurt.  By this woman.

carlynsmall

What happened afterward is a system spiraling out of control, and well worth the read. But what made two Glynn County cops want to kill this woman, search for a reason to open fire directly into her face, is beyond all comprehension.  What made some in the system decide after that they deserve protection for this murder is a story for another day.

H/T Wrongway

23 thoughts on “Any Excuse To Kill

    1. SHG Post author

      Even though you didn’t know it, you were third on this typo, but you did use the official [sic] for which I am appreciative.

  1. Larry Jelley

    ” So they shot out her tired…” Should be “tire” or “tires”. You cutting back on the coffee this morning Scott? No need to post. Tragic story.

    1. SHG Post author

      My old editor, Marilou, disappeared on me one day, and my new editor is a slacker, whose favorite phrase is “wann auch immer.”

  2. Osama bin Pimpin

    Thanks for making this one about a pretty white girl. The problem of police brutality is authority mishbehaving with impunity, not racism. Fools like Toni Morrison arguing that the problem would be fixed if the cops shot more white boys in the back.

    1. SHG Post author

      For the ten thousandth time, the problem is cops versus non-cops. Whites die too, but blacks and Hispanics clearly suffer more. It can be both, and it can recognize that cops will kill anyone, but kill blacks more. Reality is in the numbers, not the rhetoric.

      1. Osama bin Pimpin

        [Trigger warning for uncontroversial affability]: Agree.

        Everything negative impacts disadvantaged groups disproportionately. Work, death, poverty, taxes, etc. But in spite of the fact that diabetes disproportionately affects blacks, we just try to prevent and manage disease rather than accuse it of racism.

        What’s notable is that Carolyn Small is a member of two disadvantaged groups who are fucked with by the cops and everyone else maybe more disproportionately than blacks: crazy people and consumers of illegal intoxicants.

  3. John Barleycorn

    I wonder if I keep saying grand jury, grand jury, grand jury over and over again while clicking my heels, if in the future anybody serving as juror on a grand jury, including lawyers will have read a really, really well written book about grand juries that has yet to be written?

    Thank you Wrongway and the Atlanta Journal Constitution and you, of course, for another fascinating post. People should pay you to write even if you do read the New York Times everyday.

    Rest in peace Carolyn Small.

  4. Barry Sheridan

    This truly is bewildering, and this is not just to do with the fact that I am English and live thousands of miles from this sort of insanity. How can they just shoot someone like that and not get charged for murder. I have always admired the US and its people, but what is going on today is sickening. OK. it is rare, but even once without some clear justification is once too many.

    1. losingtrader

      I’ve always wondered how the “knifing” statistics in England stack up against our shooting stats. But, then this was about the police. Yet, I microagress.
      I actually believed when i started reading the post it was going to be some new and different form of death, such as the woman being electrocuted by power lines falling from the utility pole
      Silly me. I should have known better.

      1. Greg

        Funny you should ask. There was an article in the Guardian yesterday. The total number of knife offenses in England and Wales during the 12 months ended in March was 26,370, up either 2% or 13% (the article wasn’t quite clear to me) over the previous 12 months. The population of England and Wales is approximately 57 million, making the rate of knife offenses approximately 46 per 100,000 population.

        According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 467,321 people were victims of a crime committed with a firearm in 2011 (the latest information I can find in 15 minutes on the internet. The population of the United States is approximately 319 million. making the rate of gun crime approximately 146 per 100,000.

        That’s not actual stabbings versus actual shootings, though, just crimes where a weapon was used.

          1. losingtrader

            Nice job on the stats Greg, but it got me thinking as I sat on the beach…… which can be really a bad thing,……took about 15 seconds to find the number of lightsaber crimes in 2013 was negative 2:
            “A Wichita man was robbed of his set of matching lightsabers”
            The assailants fled in SEPARATE vehicles, what with the value of fake weapons soaring these days
            And , yes, someone has now invented one that really works to cut stuff. I knew you were dying to know that. We’ll get out of the negative column soon.

            1. SHG Post author

              Just stop it. It’s bad enough Greg took your tangential query and went down the rabbit hole, but can someone, please, try to keep comments just a tiny bit on topic instead of going flaming batshit cray cray? Please?!?

  5. JD

    The bloodshed began as a simple call to the police of a suspicious person.
    ~~~
    It’s not just cops vs. non-cops. It starts with the caller. I was approaching a restaurant door today at lunch when another patron was walking to the adjacent restaurant. We both walked by a car that was parked in a handicap spot pretty much diagonally but within the stripes. She said to me, “Well that’s one way of approaching it.” I nodded and smiled. Then she added,”I’m going to take down their license number.” I walked off wondering what on earth for.

  6. Bill Robelen

    I wonder what would happen if police officers were subject to the same rules of engagement I was under while in a combat zone. Before I was allowed to use lethal force, I had to make positive identification of the threat. I could not rely on furtive movements, or feeling threatened. Even seeing a weapon was not always enough. I could aim my weapon in advance, but I could not pull the trigger without a positive identification of the threat.

    1. Marc R

      Representing officers, a common theme emerges. While there’s no common denominator for “moral turpitude” investigations, combat veterans almost across the board are non existent in excessive use of force and wrongful shooting inquiries. From the military side I’ve heard the refrain that if someone has a weapon then you unholster, but you cannot fire unless they fire first or have weapons pointed at you and firing is imminent. The idea that “he had a gun” much less “I thought he had a gun” as justifications gets one a court martial. Why’s foreign war zone engagement more restrictive than domestic consensual citizen encounters? Unions and media heros not enforcing policy rules of escalation.

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