Attorney says newly released video of man shot in Ohio Wal-Mart while holding pellet gun, shows police "shot on sight."

Courtesy of Raw Story:

Police claim Crawford ignored their commands to drop the weapon, and the former Marine who called in the report and witnessed the shooting said Crawford “looked like he was going to go violently.” 

But attorney Michael Wright said surveillance video from the incident, which Ohio’s attorney general allowed him to watch with Crawford’s family, contradicted those accounts. 

“John was doing nothing wrong in Walmart, nothing more, nothing less than shopping,” Wright said. 

The attorney said surveillance video showed Crawford facing away from officers, talking on the phone, and leaning on the pellet gun like a cane when he was “shot on sight” in a “militaristic” response by police.

When I first covered this story last Friday, a lot of you blamed the victim and accepted the police version that he was being defiant was seen loading the weapon.

Now it turns out that he was doing none of those things: 


Wright said the family objected to the piecemeal release of evidence, such as dispatch audio and video on the day of the shooting, was biased toward the police. 

“Everything released is one-sided,” Wright said. “There is nothing favorable to John Crawford. You can’t show different pieces, show it all, don’t trickle pieces to gain favor of the public.” 

He said the video suggests Crawford probably did not see or hear officers as they arrived. 

Crawford was speaking by cell phone to his girlfriend, who was with his parents, when he was shot. 

“He said he was at the video games playing videos, and he went over there by the toy section where the toy guns were,” said LeeCee Johnson, the mother of his two children. “The next thing I know, he said, ‘It’s not real,’ and the police start shooting, and they said ‘Get on the ground,’ but he was already on the ground because they had shot him.” 

Johnson put the phone on speaker mode, and she and Crawford’s parents heard him die. 

“I could hear him just crying and screaming,” Johnson said. “I feel like they shot him down like he was not even human.”

I think that we are getting to the point now that when we hear of a black man being shot by the police, we should almost automatically take their report of the incident with a grain of salt.

I have long been somebody who usually took the police at their word, even though I am aware that there are bad cops in the world, but now I am far less likely to give them the benefit of the doubt.

P.S. I almost forgot, but Ohio is an open carry state.

Which means that it is quite likely that if this were a white man, in the exact same circumstance, the entire incident would have played out differently, and there would have been NO loss of life.