Shadow resembled Slender Man. After pumping seven bullets into 45-year-old cab driver Charles Willis’ body outside the Wilmington, Georgia man’s home, where he’d been called to investigate illegal fireworks, Officer Tom Fred explained that due to the angle of the streetlights and his own MagLite, Willis’ shadow looked like the fictional monster Slender Man. “I watch scary movies all the time, Candyman and The Exorcist and Saw,” said Fred, “I just love to let myself be scared, though I don’t let it show. But when the man’s shadow looked exactly, to the life like Slender Man, I just lost it. I don’t know why. Maybe it had something to do with the tension from the 12677 [police code for fireworks]. Also there was a lot of stuff about gangs in the news lately, and that had me on edge, because this is a quiet community and you want to keep that element out.”
Thought it wouldn’t really hurt. “My buddy [Officer Will] Robuss has a theory, when one of these skels is high, you hit him with the bullets in just the fatty places like the thigh or the butt, they won’t feel it and it won’t do much damage, really, and when they wake up handcuffed to the hospital bed they’re so fucked up on painkillers they don’t know what happened to them,” said Patrolman Sam Waltenberg. “So when I saw this big boy [veterinarian Lemuel Grover, 38] stumbling around outside the Pick-and-Go, I had him made for a dusthead and figured I’d test Robuss’ theory out.” (Grover, who had walked with a limp since being hit by a car in 2002, was not on drugs, and according to the Wooten, Kentucky coroner suffered greatly before succumbing to the 16 bullets Robuss put through his legs, arms, lungs, neck, and eye.)
Thought he was pointing a flashlight. “It was dark as fuck,” said Officer Jim Schmidt of Orange, Washington. “That’s why I was going for the flashlight. I always said I thought I had peripheral neuropathy, you can ask my friends, but I never got it diagnosed. I don’t have a good sense of touch. Like I can’t tell what things are just by touch. And here’s me in the woods trying to see what the fuck this guy [homeless man Gus Cleveland, 51] was doing up in there [adjusting his tent and bedroll]. I couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t go on, and that’s how I shot him seven times, I just kept trying to turn it on.”
Attempt at “suicide by victim of cop.” Lt. Abner Walsh of Skeggaddon, New York had been drinking heavily since his wife left him six weeks earlier; he had been cited for absenteeism and appearing unfit for duty and was about to be suspended. “I figured I would go down to Millinton, which is the black part of town here, and make a disturbance; I’d yell racial slurs, whatever I could think of, and challenge them, and eventually someone would put me out of my misery.” Walsh did this for 45 minutes before Aaron Washington, a 36-year-old unemployed mechanic, came out and told him him to “shut the fuck up before I beat your ass down,” whereupon Walsh shot him in the forehead and called for backup. “It was like a reflex,” he said.
An overwhelming desire to see what Tucker Carlson would say about it. As he approached Randy Wilson outside the downtown Gusper, Missouri 7-11, Officer Martin Sutphin saw that the 13-year-old was terrified and had his hands in the air, but as he aimed his gun all he could think of was the stirring defense Tucker Carlson of Fox News had given to Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis policeman whom Carlson claimed did not actually kill George Floyd because Floyd had instead died of a drug overdose while under Chauvin’s knee. Sutphin also recalled other police officers whose killing of black civilians Carlson had defended. “As I felt my finger on the trigger,” Sutphin said later, “I thought of how no one had ever stood up for me, as a cop or as a man; I knew if I shot this kid, Tucker Carlson would make me sound like a hero.” Six days after Sutphin killed Wilson, Carlson has yet to mention the case, but the officer, currently under house arrest, watches in hope every weeknight.
“An overwhelming desire to see what Tucker Carlson would say about it.” I am deceased (no pun intended)
As has been pointed out, the same people who loudly proclaim none of these police killings would happen if suspects would only comply with police orders are the same people whining that requiring them to wear a mask during a pandemic is Hitler, Communism, Socialism, and leftwing totalitarianism all rolled into one.
Personally, I wonder about the politicians who embrace Tasers with pistol grip handles as somehow being more humane than guns. Who vote to militarize our police equipping them like stormtroopers.
Over the years I lived in the Twin Cities mostly working as a resume writer, I worked out of three office buildings and my home. The first office building was a couple of miles from where Daunte Wright was shot. The home office was on a side street adjacent to where Philando Castile was murdered.
The "establishment" that runs the Twin Cities gets its money from healthcare monopolies (United Health Group, Medtronic, the nearby Mayo Clinic, Hazelden), the food industry (Cargill, General Mills, Land O'Lakes), big box retailers (Target, Best Buy), and big science (Ecolab, 3M, H.B. Fuller). Minnesota is a wealthy state and the Twin Cities is one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas in fly-over country.
Yet über-liberal Minnesota has incredible wealth inequality, and the Twin Cities has a militarized police force and heavy overall security presence to protect all that money. The two office buildings I worked out of not near any of the police shootings were in downtown Minneapolis and the St Paul side of Midway, the business corridor that runs through the heart of the metro area but which is adjacent to much of the poverty and which suffered a lot of damage to ethnic businesses during the George Floyd demonstrations. The business districts are well policed (also well lit with heavy traffic and lots of witnesses).
There is virtually zero rightwing political presence in the Twin Cities (other than in the ranks of the police who mostly do not live in either major city).
I don't think of Tucker Carlson when I think of this problem. I think about liberal Democrats who have tunnel vision: they can see corporate contributions but they cannot see the daily pain their constituents endure.
Just my 2¢.