Deputy on trial in autistic boy’s death

MARKSVILLE, La. — The head of the Louisiana State Police called it the most disturbing thing he has seen: a 6-year-old autistic boy’s lifeless body, strapped into the front seat of a car riddled with bullets fired by two law enforcement officers.

Video from a police officer’s body camera captured the burst of gunfire and gruesome aftermath of the shooting that killed Jeremy Mardis and critically wounded his father during a November 2015 traffic stop. The footage also showed the father with his hands raised inside his car as the deputy city marshals opened fire. At least four of their 18 shots tore into Jeremy.

“He didn’t deserve to die like that,” State Police Col. Mike Edmonson said in the days after the shooting.

Sixteen months later, jury selection began Monday in the trial of Derrick Stafford, one of the two deputies charged with second-degree murder in the first-grader’s death. An initial 300 jurors were summoned to court, and questioning suggests many have seen the video.

Prosecutors say this bodycam video proves Jeremy’s unarmed father, Christopher Few, didn’t pose a threat to the deputies as they fired on his car from a safe distance.

Defense attorneys argue that Stafford and the other deputy, Norris Greenhouse Jr., acted in self-defense. They claim Few drove recklessly as he led deputies on a 2-mile chase and then rammed into Greenhouse’s vehicle.

A State Police detective has testified there isn’t any physical evidence of Few’s car colliding with Greenhouse’s vehicle, but couldn’t rule that out as a possibility.

Marksville’s deputy city marshals are part-timers who normally serve court papers, but they had been stopping cars and writing traffic tickets for months. City Marshal Floyd Voinche Sr. began dispatching his deputies on patrols amid a budget battle between the mayor and an elected judge.