KILLER COP WALKS
Found not guilty in Facebook video shooting Victim’s mom: ‘System continues to fail black people’
A Minnesota jury found Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez not guilty Friday of all charges stemming from his shooting of Philando Castile (inset) as Castile sat in a car with his girlfriend during a traffic stop last summer.
PHILANDO CASTILE’S final moments were streamed live on Facebook — but even that couldn’t convince a jury Friday to find the Minnesota cop who shot him guilty of manslaughter.
The incident sparked national outrage, but it took a jury — made up of 10 whites and two blacks — 30 hours to find Officer Jeronimo Yanez not guilty of all charges against him in the July 2016 shooting.
“Damn, what is it going to take?” Castile’s mother Valerie Castile, who yelled “f--- this s---” as she left the courtroom, according to witnesses.
“The system continues to fail black people and it will continue to fail you all,” she added, saying that her son cooperated with police but had been murdered by the city he loved.
Yanez, who is Hispanic, pulled over Castile, a 32-year-old African-American cafeteria worker, for a broken taillight in St. Paul.
In the car with Castile was his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and her 4-year-old daughter, who was in the backseat.
Castile tried telling Yanez that he was a licensed gun owner and had a firearm with him, according to Reynolds.
Yanez opened fire as Castile reached for either his wallet or seat belt, Reynolds said.
In the moments after the shooting, the 27-year-old used her phone to record her boyfriend bleeding to death in the driver’s seat.
The anger that spread across the country over his death boiled over again Friday when the Castile family realized that Yanez would join a growing list of cops acquitted in controversial police shootings.
“This was supposed to be the last time that America sees something like this; something would be done about it,” Castile’s uncle Tracy Castile told the Daily News. “Over the last couple years: Eric Garner, Michael Brown. All these killings, and all these killers are going free?”
Reynolds said after the verdict, “It is a sad state of affairs when this type of criminal conduct is condoned simply because Yanez is a policeman.”
In his defense, the Twin Cities cop said he was scared for his life because Castile disobeyed his orders and was going for his gun.
“I told him not to reach for it,” Yanez is seen screaming on Reynold’s video, moments after opening fire.
The defense hinged in part on where the weapon was when the officer pulled the trigger. Police dash cam video captured Yanez saying immediately after the shooting that he didn’t know where the gun was and that he told Castile not to grab it.
The footage also showed Castile saying, “I’m not pulling it out” before Yanez opened fire — and moaning “I wasn’t reaching for it” after being shot.
The defense also brought up the fact that THC, a chemical found in marijuana, was found in Castile’s system, and could have impacted his reactions.
However, a toxicologist testified that it would be impossible to determine when he had last smoked pot.
A forensic expert at trial said the bullets came close to hitting Reynolds and her daughter, but the jury also acquitted Yanez of endangering their lives with his gunfire.
Rep. Cedric Richmond (DLa.), the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, condemned the result.
“This verdict tells African Americans across the country that they can be killed by police officers with impunity, even when they are following the law, and that it is reasonable for any person interacting with an African American in any way to fear for his or her life,” he said.
The incident was one of several high-profile police shootings last summer, coming only a day after the shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge.
Activists both in the Twin Cities and across the nation protested as part of the Black Lives Matter movement against brutality toward black men and boys.
Thousands of demonstrators gathered Friday evening at the nearby state Capitol to protest the verdict. They carried signs that read “Unite for Philando” and “Corrupt systems only corrupt.” Protesters also blocked traffic by standing side-by-side across a highway.
Juror Dennis Ploussard told KARE TV that the jury was split 10-2 early in deliberations, and that the two black jurors were not the holdouts.
He said that the deliberations were “very, very hard” and that the jury spent a lot of time on the idea of “culpable negligence,” where a suspect creates the unreasonable risk of death.
Yanez was offered a “voluntary separation agreement” from the St. Anthony Police Department minutes after the verdict. If convicted, he would have faced up to 10 years in prison.