Maybe the notion of police being held responsible for unwarranted deadly violence isn't so insane a theory after all.
Two Louisiana police officers were arrested on Friday on charges of killing a 6-year-old boy and critically wounding his father during a car chase that ended in a volley of bullets, state police said.
The officers were attempting to serve an arrest warrant on the boy’s father in the central Louisiana community of Marksville, authorities said.
State police were still piecing together what led to Tuesday’s shooting and had reviewed footage captured on the officers’ body cameras, Colonel Michael Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, said during a Friday press conference announcing the arrests.
“As I told you, we took some of the body camera’s footage,” Edmonson said. “I’m not going to talk about it, but I’m going to tell you this: It is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen. And I’ll leave it at that.”
The officers, Lieutenant Derrick Stafford and Officer Norris Greenhouse, were facing charges of second-degree murder and attempted murder, he said.
They were working for the Marksville City Marshal when they tried to serve an arrest warrant on a man identified as Chris Few, authorities have said. Few fled in his vehicle, with his young son, Jeremy Mardis, in the car, authorities said.
A preliminary investigation showed the marshals chased the vehicle and fired at it multiple times when the pursuit ended.
It was unclear if the arrested officers had obtained attorneys or how they would plead to the charges.
Two other officers were also under investigation in connection with the shooting, local media reported.
And you know what? Jeremy Few, the young boy murdered, was white. The two deputies in this case? Black. These men were arrested and charged with murder within 72 hours of the incident, and this incident seems to be completely blatant.
The race of the people involved in this absolute travesty shouldn't matter, but it does, because there's no doubt in my mind if they were reversed, if it was two white cops killing a black boy, well...we know how that turns out, don't we?
Ohio prosecutor Timothy McGinty accused the family of 12-year-old police shooting victim Tamir Rice of being “economically motivated” in their pursuit to bring the officer responsible to trial.
“They waited until they didn’t like the reports they received. They’re very interesting people… let me just leave it at that… and they have their own economic motives,” McGinty said during a community meeting Thursday, Cleveland’s WKYC reported.
McGinty’s remarks Thursday were his first public comments on the grand jury process regarding Rice’s death, raising questions about his objectivity in the case and its ongoing investigation.
The prosecutor’s office uncustomarily released expert reports in October, ahead of convening a grand jury, stating that Cleveland police officer Timothy Lehmann was justified in fatally shooting Rice only seconds after pulling up beside him in a public park in November 2014.
I'm so tired of this. I'm tired of cops killing kids, people, Americans. But I'm also tired of finding out just how little those deaths matter when the victims are of color, and I'm tired of prosecutors deciding that mothers of dead kids are the problem.
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