Civil-rights jury clears policeman in fatal shooting

NLR officer hit man in back

A federal jury spent four days scrutinizing a North Little Rock police officer’s split-second decision to use deadly force on May 8, 2011, before deciding Friday afternoon that his actions were reasonable.

The civil-rights case verdict, delivered after about five hours of deliberations, exonerates 28-year police veteran Vincent Thornton, who said he believed a 20-year-old man he and other officers had chased into the Silver City Courts housing project at 2 a.m. held a gun in his left hand and was about to shoot him with it.

The shiny object that Thornton had glimpsed in Henry Lee Jones Jr.’s hand was actually a cellphone.

Jones was shot in the lower to middle area of the right side of his back. The .40-caliber bullet fired by Thornton’s Beretta handgun tore a diagonal path inside Jones, traveling slightly upward and to the left, coming to rest between his lungs and leaving him partially paralyzed from about the nipples down. Jones died from complications of the injury on June 17, 2013, at age 22.

Police, the state Crime Laboratory and experts hired by the defense said the trajectory of the bullet and the residue left behind was consistent with Thornton’s contention that Jones was partially bent over, angling toward Thornton’s stomach, when Thornton fired the gun as its barrel was in contact with Jones’ T-shirt.

Attorneys for Jones’ mother, Jacqueline Nunn, and his father, Henry Jones, argued that Thornton violated Jones’ civil rights by using excessive force, by shooting Jones in the back as he ran from police when he hadn’t even committed a crime. They contended that Thornton shot him from a distance of at least 6 feet.

They cited testimony from another officer who said he heard a noise and looked up to see Thornton behind Jones. But defense attorney John Wilkerson, with the Arkansas Municipal League, told jurors that the other officer’s account was consistent with Thornton’s if jurors considered that it was a “rapidly evolving situation” while everyone was in motion in poor lighting conditions.

Wilkerson said Thornton and the other officers began chasing Jones because of a 911 report about a man beating a woman near a white BMW in a nearby alley. The white BMW belonged to Jones’ pregnant girlfriend, Nichole Franklin.

Jones acknowledged in a videotaped deposition in 2012 that he had been chasing Franklin around the car after she grabbed his cellphone and began reading his text messages. He said the couple raised their voices and cursed at each other, but there was no physical confrontation.

He said they got back into the car, which Franklin had parked in a relative’s carport, and then headed down an alley when police appeared and turned on their blue lights. Jones said that although Franklin wanted to stop for police, he urged her to keep driving because he feared he would be arrested on outstanding warrants.

Jones soon jumped out of the car and ran into the nearby housing project, where he had several friends, with officers pursuing him on foot.

Thornton and Tommy Lopez, an Arkansas state trooper, chased Jones into an area of the housing project where there were storage closets outside each residence. While they pondered in which closet he was hiding, Jones said in his deposition that he tried to figure out how many officers were waiting outside, where they were and what he should do.

When he heard them start opening and closing storage closets, he bolted. He said that in his periphery vision, as he ran out of the closet outside Apartment 45, he saw an officer’s arm reach as if to grab him, but he wasn’t focused on the officer.

Jones testified that he wasn’t sure where he was headed, but he went about eight steps when he was shot in the back. He said he didn’t know where the shot came from.

Thornton and Lopez described seeing Jones run forward and suddenly “angle back” in Thornton’s direction, his upper body partially bent over with his left arm beneath him, which Thornton said prevented him from clearly seeing what the reflective object was that he’d glimpsed in Jones’ left hand.

Thornton, who is left-handed, said he had unholstered his gun while trying to figure out which closet Jones was in, and that he held the gun up by his head as the bent-over Jones collided with him. Fearing that Jones was trying to shoot him in the stomach, Thornton said he fired into Jones’ back.

Bryce Brewer, an attorney for Jones’ family, repeatedly told jurors — seven women and five men — that the “undisputed facts” were that Jones was shot in the back while trying to escape police, and that an autopsy determined he died from complications of a gunshot wound to his torso. He asked jurors to find Thornton liable for Jones’ death and order him to pay the dead man’s family more than $2 million to cover his medical and funeral expenses.

Wilkerson reminded jurors of testimony from Jones and his mother that the effects of the shooting — partial paralysis, a colostomy bag, a feeding tube, and bed and pressure sores that became infected — were hard to treat, and that Jones might still be alive today if he had taken better care of himself.