Police Shoot Unarmed Man in the Back, Kill Him, Claim the Ink Pen He Was Holding was Deadly

 

For the last three years, the family of Tommy Le, 20, has been fighting to carry the King County Sheriff's Office in charge of the death of their son.

After fighting an uphill battle, they're finally shedding some light on their son's case and exposing the corruption within the sheriff's department over how they justified his murder for holding a pen.

In June of 2017, Le was experiencing a psychological state crisis.

Neighbors called police to report his behavior and moments after cops showed up, Le would have two bullet holes in his back and one in his hand, lying dead on the bottom.

An independent report commissioned by the Office of enforcement Oversight found a slew of flaws within the way the King County Sheriff's department "Investigated" themselves.

For starters, the report did not mention that Le was "Likely deed from the deputy at the time the bullets struck him" and posed zero threat to anyone.

"Most significantly, the Review Board wasn't presented with a transparent picture of what Le was doing and where he was occupation reference to the on-scene deputies and civilians when the shooting occurred," the report said, suggesting "That the threat level to the shooter deputy was diminishing at the time he fired - albeit the deputy believed Le possessed a knife."

After the officer killed Le, rather than investigating the officer for the shooting, they allowed the deputy to easily submit a report.

This fact got the eye of the oversight board who was commissioned to conduct the systemic review into the KCSO's alleged investigation.

"The typical process is that the officer is interviewed," Mike Gennaco, a principal with OIR group who administered the review, said.

"The whole idea of getting a report suffice for the primary statement from an involved deputy in officer-involved shooting: that's unique to us. we've not seen it before," he said.

"When you're writing a report, you get to make a decision about what you write, there is no ability to ask follow-up questions."

His review said once the deputy was interviewed, investigators asked no follow-up questions and didn't provide a summary or transcript of the interview, which contained details that were at odds with the officer's initial report.

More generally, the review said KCSO continues to abide by a "Debunked" notion that memory can improve after officers get some sleep.

The policy is merely applied to officers within the wake of a deadly force incident, to not other witnesses or situations.

The report states, "Special rules like these only serve to strengthen skepticism about the rigor and objectivity of such investigations."

Gennaco says "There's really no good science to suggest that memory improves after 48 hours and positively memory doesn't improve after five weeks." Nevertheless, this is often what happened in the case of Tommy Le's killing.

Instead of asking the cop why he shot Le within the back as he ran away, cops chose to focus their efforts on finding a non-existent knife because killing someone holding a pen is tough to justify.

"The lengths to which KCSO detectives sought to find out whether Le actually possessed a knife during his encounter with the civilians stand in sharp contrast to the short-shrift dedicated to the opposite and more critical aspects of the encounter, namely the on-scene deputies' actions, and decision-making," the report states, adding, "This obsession with whether Le had a knife when he aggressed the civilians extended to KCSO's public statements about the incident."

Deputies even visited Le's home and grabbed knives from his kitchen and showed them to witnesses attempting to urge one to mention Le was armed.

They visited a tremendous extent to suggest or prove that Tommy did have a knife, albeit there was no evidence that he had taken a knife from his home. They visited his home, they collected knives, they showed them to witnesses, they tried to urge an identification. So this was kind of working overtime to possess the story go the way that they had put it out initially, rather than going to the reality of the matter," said Deborah Jacobs, the director of King County's Office of Enforcement Oversight.

After being unable to seek out a knife or maybe fabricate a witness statement, the department made the ridiculous claim that the pen Le was holding could have killed one among the three officers who had him surrounded that night.

"Although deputies and witnesses were convinced Le had a knife, it's not clear that events would have evolved differently if deputies realized that Le held a pen. A pen is often used as an improvised weapon. aimed toward vulnerable parts of the body, just like the face or throat, it can cause serious bodily injury if wont to stab someone," a press release from the KCSO said.

Le weighed but 140 pounds and was surrounded by cops in body armor, holding only a pen and police claimed that this small man could've somehow used this pen to kill all three cops.

This statement is an insult to any rational person and therefore the OLEO report agrees.

The new report says this signal that deputies could again use deadly force against someone "Armed only with a pen is an additional remarkable statement."

That statement "Floored me, quite frankly," Gennaco said.

"I think that three deputies on the scene with a private who has only got a pen should be ready to neutralize that threat without having to resort to deadly force under any circumstances."

Gennaco went on to mention that the KCSO should retract the statement that the pen is deadly.

They have not retracted it and instead circled the wagons to defend the killer cop.

In the land of the free, police can and can escape with murdering unsound people and justify it by claiming a pen may be a deadly weapon.