Rally convenes for man shot and injured by police
Attorney for K'aun Green says client was struck four times by bullets
SAN JOSE >> Community members on Friday held a rally for K'aun Green, the man who was shot and injured by San Jose police after he disarmed another person during a fight at a downtown eatery.
About 50 people attended the event, organized to show solidarity with Green and his family. A flyer distributed at the event called for San Jose police to release unedited body-camera footage and any other video depicting the shooting and the events surrounding it, pay Green for his suffering, and name and fire the officer who shot him.
“We're tired of being here,” Santa Clara County public defender and district attorney candidate Sajid Khan told attendees. “But we're here because of pain, grief and trauma, again at the hands of the very institutions we are paying to protect us, allegedly.”
Adante Pointer, a civil rights attorney representing Green's family, said earlier in the day that his client was shot four times but that none of the bullets struck any bones despite two of them hitting his arm and one hitting his knee. The last bullet struck him in the abdomen, necessitating emergency surgery to repair damage to his intestinal area.
“He had to have emergency surgery to remove fragments, and there are some still in there,” Pointer said Friday. “He's talking, and he has a long road to recovery given what they had to do around the abdomen. It remains to be seen what's going to happen to the knee.”
San Jose Police Chief Anthony Mata and Pointer have offered dueling accounts of what unfolded at La Victoria Taqueria on March 27.
According to Mata, Green refused orders to drop the weapon and it was impossible in the moment for officers to know his intent. Pointer, however, said his client made the situation safer by taking the gun away from the instigator and had no time to react to officers' commands before he was shot in the doorway of the restaurant.
A woman who identified herself only as Kiran L. was among those who spoke at the rally. An undercover SJPD officer shot and killed her uncle, Demetrius Stanley, last year.
“We just have to remember who exactly we're fighting for. Today, it is specifically for K'aun Green, but every day it's for the hundreds of people who have lost their lives to this racist and intolerable system,” she said. “This battle is very hard. It gets very exhausting. Your heart just shrivels sometimes. But you have to keep fighting.”
Kahn, the public defender, told attendees he grew up in San Jose and spent many late nights at La Victoria.
“I can't imagine going there to eat and to come out of there with gunshots at the hands of the very police department we're purportedly paying to protect us,” Khan said.
Khan, along with other speakers, said current political and justice systems do not hold police officers accountable for their actions but instead villainize those they kill or injure.
“When someone is fortunate enough to survive a police bullet, they don't get services,” Khan said. “They get handcuffs. They get put in a jail cell. They get prosecuted. They get a felony conviction. They get their names dragged through the mud and their reputation slandered.
“That is the reality of the systems that we are living in right now and that is the reality that caused K'aun Green to be shot on Sunday night,” he continued. “It's not an aberration. This is déjà vu by design. It keeps happening because we have the same systems. We have the same people in power who are letting this happen.”
Pointer said the 20-yearold Green, who starred as a quarterback at McClymonds High School in Oakland, had received two football scholarship offers from four-year schools to play linebacker and defensive end, and was fielding looks from other colleges.
“This has really derailed those plans, but he's still trying to be positive about his outlook on life,” Pointer said. “He's improving, and I'm hoping he stays on the same trajectory. He's hanging in there.”