A Minnesota traffic stop turned deadly Wednesday evening when a
police officer opened fire on a black driver and killed him — less than
48 hours after another fatal police shooting in Louisiana.
The confrontation’s bloody aftermath was broadcast live on Facebook by a female passenger in the car.
“He killed my boyfriend,” Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds said in the video posted on her Facebook page.
Wednesday’s victim, 32-year-old Philando Castile, died at a Minneapolis hospital, a family member told The Washington Post.
Minnesota
Gov. Mark Dayton (D) said Thursday that he has asked the White House
for a federal investigation into the shooting. In a statement, Dayton
said he spoke with Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, to
ask that the Justice Department look into the episode.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has already opened an investigation into the fatal shooting, Dayton said.
As
blood soaked through Castile’s shirt Wednesday night, Reynolds said on
camera that Castile was legally licensed to carry a firearm and was
reaching for his identification when the officer started to shoot.
“He
let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his
wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm,” she said.
Castile moaned and appeared to lose consciousness as the officer shouted expletives in the background in apparent frustration.
“Ma’am,
keep your hands where they are,” he yelled at Reynolds. “I told him not
to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up.”
“You told him
to get his ID, sir, his driver’s license,” Reynolds responded. “Oh my
God. Please don’t tell me he’s dead. Please don’t tell me my boyfriend
just went like that.”
The incident occurred in Falcon Heights,
Minn., a quiet St. Paul suburb that is a few miles from St. Anthony. The
St. Anthony Police Department confirmed the driver’s death during a
brief news conference Thursday morning but did not identify the officer
involved in the shooting or his race.
Castile’s family members and friends said was a “good man” who worked for St. Paul Public Schools.
Reynolds told
reporters on Thursday morning that she and Castile were on their way
home when he was shot. Castile had just gotten a haircut for his
upcoming birthday, she said, and then they had gone grocery shopping.
The two were pulled over for a broken tail light.
Reynolds
said the officer came to the window and instructed them to put their
hands in the air. He then asked to see Castile’s license and
registration, which, Reynolds said, Castile kept in a thick wallet in
a pants pocket.
“As he’s reaching for his back pocket wallet, he
lets the officer know: ‘Officer, I have a firearm on me.’ I begin to
yell, ‘But he’s licensed to carry,’” Reynolds said. “After that, he [the
officer] began to take off shots: ba ba ba ba. ‘Don’t move, don’t
move!’”
“But how can you not move when you’re reaching for
license and registration?” Reynolds said. “It’s either you want my hands
in the air or you want my identification.”
Authorities did not provide details about the encounter during two early morning press conferences.
The Justice Department said Thursday that it was “aware of the incident and is assessing the situation.”
White
House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One
that the president “is deeply disturbed” by the reports of shootings in
Minneapolis and Louisiana.
Rep. Keith
Ellison (D-Minn.), whose district is about 2 miles from the scene, told
CNN the shooting was not an isolated incident.
“There is a systematic targeting of African Americans and a systematic lack of accountability,” Ellison said.
Castile’s death followed the fatal police shooting of another black man, Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, La.
In
both cases, cellphone video footage of the incident or its immediate
aftermath quickly circulated on social media, fueling anger and protests
over the police officers’ actions.
From her video, Reynolds
appears to have begun recording seconds after her boyfriend was shot,
just after 9 p.m. local time. (The footage appears to have been flipped
when it was uploaded to social media sites, mistakenly suggesting
Castile was the passenger in the car when, in fact, he was the driver.)
Castile’s
mother, Valerie Castile, told CNN early Thursday morning that she first
found out her son had been shot when she heard her daughter, who was
watching the video on social media, start to scream.
“I was like, ‘What’s going on? What’s wrong with you?’” she told CNN.
She said she rushed to the scene to see him but was stopped by police.
“I
asked them where was my son was at,” she told CNN. “I didn’t want to
talk to anyone. I just wanted to know where my son was because I didn’t
want my son to die alone.”
She said in the interview Thursday morning that she still had not been allowed to identity her son’s body.
Valerie Castile described her son as a “laid back” and “quiet” man who worked to provide for his family.
“He’s
not a gang banger; he’s not a thug,” she told CNN. “He’s very
respectable and I know he didn’t antagonize that officer in any way to
make him feel like his life was in danger.”
She said she assumes
her son did have a firearm with him because “that was something that we
always discussed” but that he had a license for it. She said she always
taught him to “comply” with law enforcement.
“The key thing in
order to try to survive being stopped by the police is to comply,” she
told CNN. “Whatever they ask you to do, do it. Don’t say nothing. Just
do whatever they want you to do. So what’s the difference in complying
and you get killed anyway?
“I made sure my kids understood the
difference in being law abiding, and that the police were there to
help,” she added. “I never once in my life have thought that my son
would actually be killed by the persons that are supposed to protect and
serve him.”
Within hours after the incident, a crowd had
gathered at the site of the shooting, according to local television
stations. When authorities removed Castile’s car, angry protesters tried
to block the tow truck, according to KARE reporter Melissa Colorado.
As vehicle was towed away, the protesters chanted “murderer,” according to Fox9’s Ted Haller.
Candles were placed at the site where Castile was shot.
Protesters then gathered outside the Minnesota governor’s mansion, chanting “Philando Castile.”
“I
extend my deepest condolences to the family, friends, and community of
Philando Castile,” Dayton said in his statement Thursday. “Our state
today grieves with them.”
Castile’s relatives said they were stunned by the shooting.
“He’s
gone,” Philando’s sister, Allysza Castile, 23, said through tears
during an interview with The Post early Thursday morning.
Reynolds,
Castile’s girlfriend, said that in the moments after the shooting, she
was trying to stay calm for her 4-year-old daughter who was in the car,
but it was her daughter who provided comfort at a tragic time.
“My
daughter told me stay strong, and that’s what I had to do. My daughter
told me, ‘don’t cry,’ and that’s what I had to do. My daughter prayed
for me,” Reynolds told reporters Thursday, adding: “She knew that he was
gone before I knew, and she said, ‘Mom, the police are bad guys. They
killed him and he’s never coming back. He’s never coming back.”
“They
took a part of my heart, they took a part of my soul,” Reynolds said.
“He had no probable cause to take my boyfriend away from me. … They took
him away and now they have to pay. I will not be able to sleep until I
get justice.”
“And even after justice this will never go away,” she added.
Later,
the governor came out to speak at an NAACP press conference, addressing
Diamond Reynolds and Castile’s uncle, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am
that this is terrible tragedy forced upon your family.”
Reynolds responded: “I don’t want you guys to say you’re sorry. I was justice.”
Dayton,
speaking over shouts of those assembled and before departing,
responded, “You will get justice. You deserve justice. You will get
justice.”
 |
Philando Castile (Courtesy of Allysza Castile)
|
A website for J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School lists Phil Castile as its cafeteria supervisor.
Clarence Castile, Philando’s uncle, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune
that his nephew had worked in the school’s cafeteria for 12 to 15
years, “cooking for the little kids.” He said his nephew was “a good
kid” who grew up in St. Paul. Philando Castile’s Facebook page says he attended the University of Minnesota.
Police in St. Anthony, a village outside of Minneapolis, seemed almost as stunned by the killing as Castile’s family.
Sgt. Jon Mangseth, interim chief, said the shooting was the first he could remember in the department’s history.
“We
haven’t had an officer-involved shooting in 30 years or more. I’d have
to go back in the history books, to tell you the truth,” he said during a
news briefing at the crime scene. “It’s shocking. It’s not something
that occurs in this area often.”
Mangseth said details of the shooting were still unclear.
“As
this unfolds we will release the information as we learn it, and we
will address concerns as we are made aware of them,” he said, adding he
had yet to see the Facebook video, which he had only learned about from
members of the media. “As we learn more information we will release that
in a press release.”
Mangseth said he believed the officer involved in the shooting had “in excess of five years” on the police force.
The
interim chief did not add any more details during a second news
conference early Thursday morning, except to say that the driver had
died and that a gun had been recovered from the scene.
The video startled police reform advocates across the nation, who expressed a mixture of frustration and fatigue.
“Philando
Castile should be alive today,” DeRay Mckesson, a prominent member of
the Black Lives Matter movement who worked in nearby Minneapolis, wrote
in a text message early Thursday morning.
“I don’t know what else
to say,” Mckesson said of the video. “He should be alive today. He is
not alive because a police officer murdered him in cold blood.”
Castile
is at least the 506th person shot and killed by police so far in 2016,
according to a Washington Post database that tracks such shootings.
He
is one of 123 black Americans shot and killed by police so far in 2016,
according to the database.
About 10 percent of the black Americans shot
and killed were unarmed at the time of the shooting, while about 61
percent were armed with a gun.
Castile’s death came 234 days after two police officers in nearby Minneapolis fatally shot Jamar Clark, an unarmed 24-year-old black man whose death sparked fierce protests in the city.
A
county prosecutor said in March that the two officers involved would
not face criminal charges because they believed Clark was trying to grab
one of their guns, and the Justice Department has since said that those officers won’t face federal civil rights charges, either.
Clark
was one of 990 people shot and killed by on-duty police officers during
2015, according to The Post’s database documenting police shootings. He
was one of 12 people fatally shot by officers in Minnesota last year.
A review by the Minneapolis Star Tribune conducted last year found
that since 2000, at least 143 people have been killed by police in
Minnesota and no officers have been charged in any of these deaths.
Wednesday’s shooting occurred
in a middle-class neighborhood of wood-and-stucco homes with generous
yards next to the site of the Minnesota State Fair and near the
University of Minnesota’s agricultural college. A busy intersection
nearby is home to restaurants popular to residents of Falcon Heights and
the neighboring suburb of Roseville.
It’s a desired location for homeowners because of the close proximity to both Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The video begins in jarring fashion, with Castile covered in blood, staring toward the car ceiling.
“Stay with me,” Reynolds pleads.
“We
got pulled over for a busted taillight in the back,” she explains to
the camera as the officer can be seen aiming his handgun at the dying
driver.
Reynolds continues to film even as a second officer orders her out of the car.
“Where’s my daughter?” Reynolds asks. “You got my daughter?”
An officer can be seen in the distance holding Reynolds’s child.
“Face away from me and walk backwards,” the second officer orders.
He
then tells Reynolds to get on her knees. As her daughter cries in the
background, handcuffs can be heard tightening around Reynolds’s wrists.
“Why am I being arrested?” she asks.
“Ma’am, you’re just being detained right now until we get this all sorted out, okay?” the second officer responds.
“Wow,” Reynolds says as the camera tilts upwards towards the evening sky. “They threw my phone, Facebook.”
As an ambulance draws nearer, its siren growing louder and then suddenly stopping, Reynolds grows more frantic.
“Please don’t tell me he’s gone,” she screams. “Please Jesus, no. Please no. Please no, don’t let him be gone, Lord.”
 |
| Philando Castile, right. (Courtesy of Allysza Castile) |
Someone, possibly the officer who shot Castile, can be heard cussing in the background.
“He
was reaching for his license and registration. You told him to get it
sir! You told him,” Reynolds says. “He tried to tell you he was licensed
to carry and he was going to take it off. Please don’t tell me
boyfriend is gone. He don’t deserve this.”
The screen goes black.
“Please Lord, you know our rights Lord,” Reynolds says, apparently praying.
“You know we are innocent people, Lord. We are innocent people.”
At one point, an officer can be heard talking to Reynolds’s daughter.
“Can you stand right here, sweetie?” a male officer says.
“I’m gonna get my mommy’s purse,” the girl says, her face flashing on screen as she picks up her mother’s still-recording phone.
“Is that your phone?” the male officer asks.
The video then cuts to Reynolds sitting in the back of a squad car.
“Don’t be scared,” she tells her daughter, before addressing the camera.
“My daughter just witnessed this,” she says. “The police just shot him for no apparent reason, no reason at all.”
“It’s okay, Mommy,” the little girl says, as her mother sobs. “It’s okay. I’m right here with you.”
“Y’all
please pray for us,” Reynolds says at the end of the video. “I ask
everybody on Facebook, everybody that’s watching, everybody that’s tuned
in, please pray for us.”
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PLEASE BE POLITE