Family autopsy: Man shot from behind, side
Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man whose killing by police has led to protests, was hit eight times.
Stephon Clark, the unarmed black man who was killed by Sacramento police in his grandmother’s backyard, was shot eight times from behind or the side, according to a private autopsy commissioned by his family. The autopsy concluded that Clark’s death was not instantaneous, taking an estimated three to 10 minutes, raising questions about why Clark was not given more immediate medical care after the shooting.
Clark, whose death has sparked protests throughout the city, was shot at more than 20 times by officers responding to a vandalism report in a Sacramento neighborhood last week.
At least eight of those bullets struck Clark — with none of them entering from the front, according to an analysis by Dr. Bennet Omalu, a private medical examiner his family’s lawyer hired to conduct an independent autopsy, which was released Friday.
According to Omalu, Clark was shot four times in the lower part of his back, twice in his neck, and once under an armpit. He was also shot in the leg. One of the neck wounds was from the side, the doctor found.
“You could reasonably conclude that he received seven gunshot wounds from his back,” Omalu said at a news conference Friday. He added that each of those seven shots could have had a “fatal capacity” and described severe damage to Clark’s body, including a shattered vertebrae and a collapsed lung.
“These findings from the independent autopsy contradict the police narrative that we’ve been told,” Benjamin Crump, the family’s lawyer, said in a statement. “This independent autopsy affirms that Stephon was not a threat to police and was slain in another senseless police killing under increasingly questionable circumstances.”
Crump said the results proved that Clark could not have been moving in a threatening fashion toward the officers when they opened fire.
Clark’s family has expressed frustration with the response from county and city officials, whom they have suggested are trying to cover up misconduct by their police officers. The independent autopsy, Crump and his team said, was undertaken to guarantee impartiality. The Sacramento County Coroner’s office has not publicly released Clark’s autopsy results, but did confirm that he died of multiple gunshot wounds. They had not disclosed how many bullets hit Clark. Sacramento police did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the private autopsy.