Via NBC News online: The encounter unfolded after witnesses called police to report the hit-and-run, and said the driver, Sanchez's father, had fled the scene and driven to the residence. Mathews did not know if anyone was injured in the crash, but said the car hadn't struck any people.
Upon arriving at the house to investigate the accident, Lt. Matthew Lindsey saw Sanchez on the porch, holding a 2-foot-long metal pipe "wrapped in some type of material" with a small leather loop on the end of it, Mathews said.
A neighbor, Jolie Guebara, later told The Associated Press that Sanchez often carried the pipe to fend off stray dogs when he went for walks at night.
The lieutenant perceived the pipe as a weapon and called for backup. Sgt. Chris Barnes arrived.
"When the other unit arrived, verbal commands were being given to this individual to drop the weapon and get on the ground," Mathews said.
Instead of doing that, Sanchez kept moving toward officers, Mathews said. Lindsey and Barnes ordered him to "drop the weapon and get on the ground."
That's when witnesses started yelling "he can't hear you," according to Mathews.
"The witnesses were yelling that this person, Mr. Sanchez, was deaf, and could not hear," he said. "The officers did not know this as the time."
Mathews did not know whether the officers heard the witnesses' screams.
He said Lindsey then deployed his Taser and Barnes fired a gun when Sanchez had got about 15 feet away from them.
Both struck him. Sanchez was pronounced dead at the scene, despite medical attention that was given.
Sanchez's father, who was not named, confirmed to police that his son was deaf....
"When you have a weapon out, you can get what they call tunnel vision, or you can lock into just the person who has the weapon, the threat against you," the captain said. "I don't know exactly what the officers were thinking ... But they very well could have not heard everybody yelling around them."
8 comments:
Sounds tragic. Maybe that is not the right way to describe it.
I get the tunnel vision thing, but who walks up to cops with a metal pipe in his hand. And even if deaf, couldn't he see the cops with guns drawn?
We will probably learn that he was 275 lbs and 6'4".
There is more to this story than is being reported. Sounds very fishy.
One wonders if this is another result of Willie's much-vaunted policy of putting 100,000 more cops on the country's streets. Standards had to be lowered and we've seen a lot of incidents like this.
I could easily be wrong, but I wonder.
AJ Lynch said...
We will probably learn that he was 275 lbs and 6'4"
Always a possibility.
One cop shoots a tazer. Same time as the other cop shoots his service revolver. Then the guy dies.
I certainly hope he gets severely reprimanded for unauthorized use of a tazer.
He may have been deaf, but he sure was stupid. You've got cops with their weapons drawn on you. You are holding a metal pipe, you keep walking towards them. Why? You think they are going to say hello?
Wouldn't he have to drop the pipe to sign "Hello"?
They all screwed up. The dead guy most of all, but that's a moment the cops will be replaying at 3 am for the rest of their lives. In moments of mortal danger, your head doesn't always function in the best possible way, and then you get the rest of your life to contemplate what was the best possible way. I'd give the cops a pass on this, and hope that they can give themselves a pass on misreading the situation.
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