When a 23-year-old autistic man carrying a toy truck wandered from a mental health center out into the street Monday, a worker there named Charles Kinsey went to retrieve him.
A few minutes later the autistic man was still sitting cross-legged blocking the roadway while playing with the small, rectangular white toy. And Kinsey was prone on the ground next to him — a bullet from an assault rifle fired by a police officer having struck his leg.
“He throws his hands up in the air and says, ‘Don’t shoot me.’ They say lie on the ground, so he does,” Kinsey’s attorney Hilton Napoleon said Wednesday. “He’s on his back with his hands in the air trying to convince the other guy to lie down. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Cellphone video footage obtained by Napoleon clearly shows the heavy-set autistic man sitting and playing with his toy while Kinsey, dressed in a yellow shirt and shorts, obeys police orders to lie down on his back.
To recap, the guy who was shot by police did everything that he was ordered to do by the police and still got a bullet for his trouble. And if the timeline is close to correct, one might assume that the cops were hoping that the shot guy would bleed out before the paramedics showed up. For there seems to be zero evidence that anybody rendered first aid.
The therapist said police then rushed him, patted him down and put him in handcuffs. Kinsey said what police did after the shooting is what upsets him the most. “They flipped me over, and I’m faced down in the ground, with cuffs on, waiting on the rescue squad to come. I’d say about 20, about 20 minutes it took the rescue squad to get there. And I was like, bleeding — I mean bleeding, and I was like, ‘Wow.'”
North Miami Beach had better warm up its checkbook.
The cop said he was aiming for the autistic guy because he thought he might be a danger to the therapist. Three shots, with a rifle, and he hits the wrong guy. Maybe a BB gun is stretching it for that guy. Try a nerf gun instead?
ReplyDelete-Doug in Oakland
Doug, I'm thinking his talents might lie more in the direction of overnight janitorial services for office buildings.
ReplyDeleteThere isn't a big enough punishment. No bullets for that entire police force for a year would begin to open a tiny crack in their colossal disregard for the public. Especially if it's widely advertised, and promised to happen in every other such jurisdiction in the country, for such infractions.
ReplyDeleteAh, but I do like to dream...