Police officers, their guns raised, approach the man in the
wheelchair and yell out loudly and repeatedly: "Drop the gun" and
"hands up."
His hands don't
rise. Shots are fired. And the man keels over out of his wheelchair and onto
the ground.
The police chief in Wilmington, Delaware, defended his officers
Thursday. The handicapped man, Jeremy McDole, was armed with a .38 caliber gun
-- the same one he'd apparently used on himself earlier, Chief Bobby Cummings
said. And he never complied with the officers' requests.
Instead,
"when Mr. McDole began to remove the weapon from his waist, the officers
engaged him," Cummings said. In other words, the officers opened fire
because they were concerned McDole might fire his weapon at them.
But the
handicapped man's mother saw it differently.
Phyllis McDole
alluded to a video -- which Cummings acknowledged but said he hasn't
authenticated -- which she said shows that her son "didn't pull a weapon.
He had his hands in his lap."
In the footage,
a witness can be heard saying "put your hands up" and "he's
reaching again." But it's not obvious what exactly the handicapped man was
doing with his hands just before the shots rang out.
Yet Phyllis
McDole -- who spoke at the same news conference as Cummings, despite their
obvious differences of opinion -- doesn't understand why her son died. He was
28-years-old and paralyzed from the waist down, she points out.
The mother said,
"This is unjust."
Mayor: 'We want answers'
The call came in around 3 p.m. Wednesday
that there was a man suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound who was
still armed, Cummings explained.
A number of
officers arrived and approached McDole. Their guns were pointed toward his
stationary wheelchair as they circled, shouting their demands that he let go of
the weapon. It wasn't evident from the video if the gun was ever in his hands
as police approached.
This took place
before a few moments of relative silence.
That's when, the
Wilmington police chief said, McDole "began to remove the weapon from his
waist, the officers engaged him and -- as a result of the injuries Mr. McDole
sustained -- he lost his life."
Hours after the shooting, the loss of life seemed about the only
thing that police and McDole's mother agreed on.
Wilmington Mayor
Dennis Williams promised at Thursday's news conference that the family
"will be notified step-by-step throughout the investigation.
And he concurred
with Phyllis McDole in at least one respect: "We want answers."
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