Dallas police face ire over portrayal of man shot by officer
DALLAS — Attorneys for the family of a black man who was killed in his own apartment by a white police officer accused Dallas police of trying to “assassinate his character” and expressed fury that authorities sought a search warrant that resulted in the discovery of marijuana in the victim’s apartment.
At a news conference Friday, the lawyers said the search warrant, which allowed investigators to look for drugs, should have never been issued.
They also called for the firing of police officer Amber Guyger, who gunned down 26-year-old Botham Jean in his own apartment on Sept. 6. She has been booked on a preliminary charge of manslaughter and is free on bond.
Lee Merritt, one of the Jean family attorneys, said Friday that investigators wasted no time in digging for dirt they could use to smear Jean’s name. Within hours of Jean being shot, they asked a judge for a warrant to search his home for drugs, among other things.
Jean’s mother expressed disgust about the reports that investigators found a small amount of marijuana in her son’s home. Allison Jean said Friday that her son’s name was smeared by reports that police found 10.4 grams of marijuana in his apartment.
She also says she wants to see the toxicology report for off-duty officer Amber Guyger, who said she mistook Jean’s apartment for her own and shot him when he didn’t obey her verbal commands.
Also Friday, dozens of demonstrators marched through the streets of downtown Dallas Friday evening and briefly blocked the westbound lanes of Interstate 30 to protest the white police officer’s fatal shooting of the black man in his own apartment.
The march, which appeared to be peaceful, began with a rally outside Dallas police headquarters Friday evening. Demonstrators marched to the interstate, where they chanted “Shut it down!” before moving through downtown streets chanting slogans such as “Justice now!” along with the name of Botham Jean, the man shot to death in his apartment on Sept. 6.
No arrests have been reported.
Guyger told investigators she mistook Jean’s apartment for her own, which is right below his, and that upon entering the dark home, she believed she had encountered an intruder and shot him when he didn’t obey her verbal commands.
Ferocious typhoon plows through rain-soaked Philippines
TUGUEGARAO, Philippines — Typhoon Mangkhut slammed into the Philippines’ northeastern coast early Saturday, its ferocious winds and blinding rain ripping off tin roof sheets and knocking out power, and plowed through the agricultural region at the start of the onslaught.
The typhoon made landfall before dawn in the coastal town of Baggao in Cagayan province on the northern tip of Luzon Island, a breadbasket of flood-prone rice plains and mountain provinces often hit by landslides. More than 5 million people were at risk from the storm, which the Hawaii-based Joint Typhoon Warning Center downgraded from a super typhoon but still punching powerful winds and gusts equivalent to a category 4 Atlantic hurricane.
There were no immediate reports of major damages or casualties in the region, where a massive evacuation from high-risk areas was carried out over two days.
Trump, Pompeo bash ex-Secretary of State Kerry on Iran talks
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unloaded Friday on his Obama-era predecessor John Kerry for “actively undermining” U.S. policy on Iran by meeting several times recently with the Iranian foreign minister, who was his main interlocutor in the Iran nuclear deal negotiations.
In unusually blunt and caustic language, Pompeo said Kerry’s meetings with Mohammad Javad Zarif were “unseemly and unprecedented” and “beyond inappropriate.” President Donald Trump had late Thursday accused Kerry of holding “illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime, which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people.”
Pompeo said he would leave “legal determinations to others” but slammed Kerry as a former secretary of state for engaging with “the world’s largest state-sponsor of terror” and telling Iran to “wait out this administration.” He noted that just this week Iranian-backed militias had fired rockets at U.S. diplomatic compounds in Iraq.
“You can’t find precedent for this in U.S. history, and Secretary Kerry ought not to engage in that kind of behavior,” an agitated Pompeo told reporters at the State Department. “It’s inconsistent with what foreign policy of the United States is as directed by this president, and it is beyond inappropriate for him to be engaged.”
Kerry, who is promoting his new book “Every Day is Extra,” tweeted a response to Trump that referred to the president’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who agreed on Friday to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation into
WASHINGTON — As Tropical Storm Florence inundated the Carolinas on Friday, President Donald Trump circled back to his claim that the official death toll from a devastating storm a year earlier in Puerto Rico was inflated and said the number of dead seemed to rise from double digits to 3,000 “like magic.”
Public health experts have estimated that nearly 3,000 perished because of the effects of Hurricane Maria. But Trump, whose efforts to help the island territory recover have been persistently criticized, has repeatedly questioned that number over the last couple of days.
“FIFTY TIMES LAST ORIGINAL NUMBER — NO WAY!” he tweeted late Friday.
Trump falsely accused Democrats on Thursday of inflating the Puerto Rican toll to make him “look as bad as possible.” He said just six to 18 people had been reported dead when he visited two weeks after the October 2017 storm and suggested that many had been added later “if a person died for any reason, like old age.”
When Trump visited Puerto Rico, the death toll at the time was indeed 16 people. The number was later raised to 64, but the government then commissioned an independent study to determine how many died because of poststorm conditions. That study — conducted by the