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| Photo Credit: AP. |
A black man in Akron, Ohio was shot at least 60 times on Monday by Ohio police as he fled following a traffic stop, his family’s lawyer says citing police body camera video he viewed, The Hill reported. The lawyer
According to
The Hill, Akron Police Department officers attempted to stop 25-year-old
Jayland Walker at 12:30 a.m. for a traffic violation and conducted a pursuit
after he refused to stop, the police department said in a Tuesday statement on
its Facebook page. Walker reportedly slowed down after a few minutes and left
his car while it was still in motion and ran away from police, according to the
statement.
The police statement
added that Walker ran into a parking lot and noted that “actions by the suspect
caused the officers to perceive he posed a deadly threat to them.” Officers
shot him and called for medical services, but Walker was pronounced dead at the
scene, according to the statement.
The attorney
for Walker’s family, Bobby Dicello, told the Akron Beacon Journal in an
interview published Friday evening that Walker does not appear to have moved
toward the officers in a threatening way based on the body cam video he viewed,
adding that officers appear to have fired dozens of shots at Walker while he
was fleeing with nothing in his hands, The Hill reported.
The unnamed officers
have been placed on paid administrative leave in accordance with departmental
procedure, according to a statement by the police department, The Hill reports.
According to
The Hill, Dicello said the video shows an officer calmly telling dispatchers
about chasing Walker at 12:30 a.m. after police attempted to stop him.
DiCello
dismissed a police department’s statement which says that officers reported a
firearm being discharged from Walker’s car while thy pursued it, telling the Journal
that the back windshield of Walker’s car was undamaged which implies that no
shot was fired directly backward.
“And I’ve
got to emphasize there is no evidence that we’ve been shown, or that we’ve
found, or that we know of that says that the young man somehow while driving
away from the officers pointed his gun at the officers,” he said.
He said he
could not corroborate claims from the Ohio Department of Transportation that
traffic video shows gunfire coming from Walker’s car.
DiCello told
the Journal that in the body cam video, an officer calls out the speed at which
Walker is traveling, as high as 50 miles per hour, before he slows down to 15
miles per hour and then runs “as if he were a football player running for the
end zone,” according to The Hill.
He said
officers ran after him and shot him “within seconds.” He compared the sound to
“a whole brick of fireworks going off.”
He noted
that the number of shots fired topped 90 and that an investigation indicates
Walker got 60 to 80 gunshot wounds.
“I think the
firing happens in about six seconds,” DiCello said. “It was an unbelievable
amount of gunfire.”