Castile killing was murder, plain and simple
About a decade ago, City of Trenton Councilwoman Annette Lartigue hosted a community series entitled “What to do when pulled over by a police officer?”
Lartigue targeted young African-American males who were schooled about behaviors that could impact how traffic stops were resolved.
The outspoken councilwoman placed an emphasis on courtesy and respect with a main objective to assure black men arrived home safely — not arrested, injured or deceased.
After watching a recently released video regarding the July 2016 murder of Philando Castile, it’s safe to say that the lives of black men rests in the hands of police officers. If they want to murder you, then they can and will, then walk away as executioners, justifiable in both deed and actions.
St. Paul, Minnesota authorities released the video after a jury acquitted of manslaughter Officer Jeronimo Yanez.
Yanez, now no longer with the department, told investigators a day after he killed Castile on July 6 that his nose received a “hit with an odor of burning marijuana” after he pulled over Castile, his girlfriend and her then-four-year-old daughter.
“I thought I was gonna die and I thought if he’s, if he has the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing, then what care does he give about me,” Yanez told the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
“I was scared to death. I thought I was going to die. My family’s faces popped up in my mind, my wife and baby girl,” Yanez added.
Yanez had pulled over Castile for a non-working break light infraction. The two men engaged in respectful conversation before Castile alerted Yanez about being armed with a license to carry.
Yanez calmly requested that Castile not reach for his gun. Seconds later, Yanez fired multiple shots into the vehicle, striking and killing Castile.
The police officer offered this explanation about the traffic stop.
“And at that point I was scared and I was in fear for my life and my partner’s life. And for the little girl in the back and the front seat passenger and he dropped his hand down and, can’t remember what I was telling him but I was telling (him) something as his hand went down I think. And, he put his hand around something. And his hand made like a C shape type um type shape and it appeared to me that he was wrapping something around his fingers and almost like if I were to put my uh hand around my gun like putting my hand up to the butt of the gun.”
Yanez said he lost view of the object.
“And, uh he started reaching out and then pulling uh away from his uh his right thigh. I don’t know if it was in his pocket or in between the seats or the center console. But I, I know he had an object and it was dark. And he was pulling it out with his right hand. And as he was pulling it out I, a million things started going through my head, And I thought I was gonna die .... ”
“And I was scared because, I didn’t know if he was gonna, I didn’t know what he was gonna do. He just had somethin’ uh his hands and he, the first words that he said to me were, some of the first words he said is that he had a gun. And I thought he was reaching for the gun. I thought he had the gun in his hand, in his right hand. And I thought he had it enough to where til he had to do is just pull it out, point it at me, move his trigger finger down on the trigger and let off rounds. And I had no other option than,to take out my firearm and, and I shot.”
And, to this bucket of BS, one should consider that if Castile had been such a bad-assed (N-word) then why in the world would he even tell Yanez about the gun? It makes no sense.
No doubt, police work represents life-and-death situations that require instant decisions.
This is murder and all the hemming and ums will never change this disturbing fact. Even worse, juries continue to allow most police officers to walk on testimony that they “feared for their lives.”
So, basically, Lartigue’s best interests could provide no certainty that behavior can alter outcomes when young, black men or even older ones, encounter police.
It’s a crap shoot. By now, U.S. residents should be weary of these incidents, all the crap and the shooting.
And death.