Source: LAURA BUCKMAN / Getty
***Editor’s note: This video below is graphic and may be disturbing to some readers.
A video was recently released showing a Fort Worth, Texas, police officer shooting a Black man in the back that later left him paralyzed.
According to NBC-Fort Worth, the footage of the July shooting was released on Tuesday by David Collie’s lawyer Nate Washington after he saw an unrelated video on Facebook of two women—who had called the police for help—being pinned on the ground and arrested by a different Fort-Worth officer.
“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen from the Fort Worth police officer in that video is not an isolated incident. Many members of our community have been assaulted, handled roughly by Fort Worth police officers,” Washington told the news station.
“To be clear, we believe the vast majority of police officers are good and decent people.”
In the video that Washington obtained from the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, an off-duty officer and deputy were responding to a reported robbery at a gas station on July 27 where one suspect had used a handgun to rob someone he had met online. Police later encountered two African-American men at a nearby apartment complex and started to question the men who they believed fit the description of the suspects. According to police, Collie refused to engage with the officers and walked away without putting his hands in the air as told. They also claim that Collie pulled out a silver box cutter and threatened the deputy sheriff, which prompted the other officer to shoot Collie in the back.
Yet, the video below doesn’t quite match up with the police officers’ account of the incident.
According to Washington, Collie never threatened the officers and he did try to comply with the officers’ requests.
“I wasn’t there that night. I do know what I saw. I know I never saw this man with a weapon. I never saw this man advance toward the officers. I know I saw him get shot in his back,” he stressed.
Washington also added that the city refused to turn over any records of the shooting and that he had to get a warrant in order to gain access to the footage.
“The process that they ask us to trust is essentially, ‘Let us do what we want to do; we will not be transparent at all, and then we’ll tell you what we concluded.’”
He added: “There are conflicting reports in the different city police reports they have written; they have various different narratives and they’re inconsistent.”
Sadly, Collie was paralyzed as a result of the shooting and was in the hospital for a total of 61 days. Even worse: The Fort-Worth police had the audacity to charge Collie with aggravated assault on a public servant, which a grand jury later dismissed probably due to lack of evidence, Washington hypothesized.
Yet, the attorney is clear: These types of incidents are not new or rare for the Texas city.
“We’ve gotten calls from attorneys across the city, who said, ‘I have videos as well, I have photographs of what happened to my client,’ and so we’re investigating the culture and the practice of the City of Fort Worth,” Washington asserted.
“We want justice for David. We want change, but we also want peace and calm from the community after they see this video.“
Fort Worth Police have yet to publicly comment on the video.
Lawyer Releases Video Of Fort Worth Police Officer Shooting Black Man In His Back was originally published on hellobeautiful.com
