59 shots
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
Officer William Salyers, Officer Lauren Bacha, Officer Zachery Moody, Officer George Romero, Officer Deborah Dennison, and Officer Bryan Wood. Chattanooga Police Department, Chattanooga, Tennessee. A young black man named Alonzo Heyward was drunk and extremely upset after a late-night party. He grabbed a rifle and pointed at himself late at night and started talking about killing himself. His family and his girlfriend were trying to talk him down like civilized people do when someone is not in his right mind and threatening to hurt himself; unfortunately, in the meantime, some bystanders saw what was happening and they called in the Chattanooga city government’s police force — who proceeded to Take Control Of The Situation by means of escalating belligerence, by surrounding Heyward, by pointing guns at him, by hollering orders, and then — when he didn’t snap to and immediately obey their bellowed commands — by tasering him down to the ground. And then lighting him up with 59 shots after he’d already been knocked to the ground when he moved to get up.
Cops claim they felt threatened by the way he moved
his rifle after he’d already been knocked to the ground by a 50,000-volt electric shock. The three non-cop witnesses on the scene (Heyward’s father, his girlfriend, and a neighbor) say they never saw Alonzo Heyward threaten to hurt anyone other than himself. They also say that Heyward was lying prone on the porch on top of the rifle when the cops first opened fire. While the cops were stopping to reload — they fired three volleys of gunfire before they decided Heyward was dead enough — the non-cop witnesses say they heard Alonzo Heyward ask the cops Why are you shooting me?
Since he certainly never posed a threat to anyone other than himself before the cops showed up, and almost certainly posed no threat to the cops, either, in spite of their belligerent escalation of the situation, it’s a good question.
Meanwhile, the six cops who lit up Alonzo Heyward — Officer William Salyers, Officer Lauren Bacha, Officer Zachery Moody, Officer George Romero, Officer Deborah Dennison, and Officer Bryan Wood — were given a seven day paid vacation by the Chattanooga city government’s police force (so that they could take some time to see a shrink at taxpayer expense). They are now back on the streets. The boss cops insist that their hired muscle acted properly; Police Chief Freeman Cooper told a Chattanooga radio station that the hail of bullets used to mow down Alonzo Heyward shows that our people did what we trained them to do.
No doubt. Eugene O’Donnell, a former government cop and government prosecutor who now teaches up-and-coming government cops how to be cops at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice [sic] in New York City, defended the hail of gunfire, saying that there is no magic number
of shots to fire and that Unfortunately this is replicated all over the country.
(Well, yeah.) When you send the police they bring deadly force with them. They come armed and they come predisposed to use force.
No doubt. Which is precisely why legally unaccountable, heavily-armed twitchy government cops shouldn’t be sent into volatile situations where a person hasn’t threatened to harm anyone other than himself.
Follow
59 rounds is called Homicide By Cop – or – Voluntary Manslaughter – or – Murder, depending on specifics.
Sounds like the citizens of Chattanooga have more than just rogue cops on their hands. Well, ’tis up to those citizens to do something about their problem.
Discussed at attackthesystem.com /#
Attack the System » Blog Archive » Updated News Digest September 6, 2009:
They killed him to save him. Ain’t that just like government?
I just graduated from the psych-tech program in which we are trained to handle cases like this. The agency here is the crisis center. They should have been notified. An individual like this can be detained for a seventytwo hour hold for psychiatric evaluation persuant to Health institutions code 5150
“Rogue cops” is redundant. I’m betting they’ll become increasingly open about the nature of their relationship to the rest of society – as bandits and racketeers – as the US Empire decays over the coming years. By the time they’re openly raiding homes and businesses for nothing more or less than to steal stuff and and terrorize folks into passivity, even the law’n’order types might actually have woken up. Not likely though, and even if they do, it’ll be much too late.
I saw a story just the other day where a high school football player in Mississippi disarmed a classmate with a gun on a bus. He did it with almost no violence (he did knock her down and take the gun, but he didn’t punch her, choke her, kick her, or anything like that.) To compare his behavior with how the police would have acted in such a situation makes one shudder.
ROJ,
They aren’t quite to the point of doing it openly yet, but they are already raiding businesses just to steal stuff and the war on drugs has created plenty of motives and opportunity for them to raid houses and then steal stuff and terrorize (or kill) the occupants.