Police ‘shot suspect in the back’
Autopsy findings by a pathologist hired by the family of Stephon Clark have called into question the Sacramento Police Department’s assertion that Clark was facing the two officers and advancing towards them when they opened fire and killed him last month.
Video from the officers’ body cameras and a Sheriff’s Department helicopter circling overhead shows Clark’s final moments but did not definitively answer the many questions that have arisen since the March 18 shooting.
Police said they were responding to reports that a man dressed in a hooded sweatshirt was breaking car windows.
The helicopter video begins with a figure scaling a backyard fence. The suspect then approaches a vehicle parked alongside Clark’s grandparents’ house and appears to look inside.
The aerial video shows two police officers running up to the side of the house, one holding a handgun, as the man later determined to be Clark disappears from view into the backyard. The officers can be seen coming around the back corner of the house, then retreating to the side of the building.
‘‘Show me your hands – gun!’’ one officer yells, according to the body camera footage. It is dark, and the body cameras briefly show the backyard with portions illuminated by the officers’ torches, but Clark is not clearly visible.
‘‘Gun, gun, gun,’’ one of the officers yells on the body camera video before they begin shooting.
As Clark comes back into view from the circling helicopter, he appears to be moving towards the officers as the first visible muzzle flash is seen. He falls forward and to the side, catches himself on his outstretched arms and hands, crawls forward briefly, then collapses.
It is not clear when he was first hit or if the officers fired before the first visible muzzle flash, but the video shows the officers continuing to shoot as Clark lies face down, unmoving.
Dr Bennet Omalu, a pathologist hired by Clark’s family, watched the helicopter video after conducting his autopsy. He said yesterday it was consistent with his findings.
Omalu said Clark was probably facing the house when he was first shot, with the bullet hitting him on the back left side of his torso. The force would have been enough to spin his body around so his back was facing the officers, Omalu said, before Clark was hit by subsequent bullets that dropped him to the ground.
He was then shot in the leg, either as he fell or while on the ground, Omalu said.
Omalu said any of the six bullets that hit Clark in the back and one in the neck could have been the fatal shot. An eighth bullet went into Clark’s thigh.
Omalu said Clark probably took between three and 10 minutes to die.
Meanwhile, a Louisiana police chief yesterday fired the white officer who fatally shot a black man during a struggle outside a convenience store nearly two years ago, a killing that set off widespread protests.
Blane Salamoni was fired for violating department policies on the use of force and ‘‘command of temper’’, less than a week after Louisiana’s attorney general ruled out criminal charges in Alton Sterling’s July 2016 death.