We’ve heard about?police shootings involving unarmed men reaching for their wallets and paper work, but this may be the first cell phone police shooting.
There was a police shooting in Florida involving a Palm Beach county deputy by the name of Adam Lin. The shooting victim’s name is Dontrell Stephens. The shooting took place on September?13, 2013. Here’s a breakdown of the video.
- Dash cam footage of the shooting shows Lin pursuing Stephens in his patrol car while Stephens was riding a bicycle. Stephens rides the bicycle onto a drive way and gets off the bike. We notice that he’s holding what appears to be a black cell phone in his right hand.
- He begins to walk behind a parked car, presumably toward the officer, who we cannot see in the video frame. He’s still holding the black cell phone in his right hand when he disappears from site on the left frame of the video for less than 5 seconds.
- You then see Stephens stagger back quickly and fall to the ground face first, at the same time you hear four gun shots ring out in rapid succession. Lin can now be seen in the frame with his gun drawn on Stephens as he falls to the ground.
- Lin continues to train his gun on Stephens and you can hear him issuing orders to Stephens, who’s still responsive, and indicates that he can’t move. Stephens couldn’t move because at that moment he became a paraplegic for the rest of his life.
In Lin’s report he said that he ordered Stephens to raise his hands, then he saw Stephens pulling an object out of his waistband. He seems to indicate that he had to make a split second decision and chose to use lethal force.
One has to question why he had his weapon drawn to fire in the first place. He was only stopping Stephens for a ?impeding the flow of traffic? on his bicycle, which is a citable offense. The speed at which Stephens was shot would seem to indicate that Lin had his weapon drawn before approaching Stephens, giving him less time to assess the situation before pulling the trigger.
Also we can already see the cell phone in Stephens’s right hand, so why would he pretend to pull it out of his waistband while approaching an officer with his weapon already drawn? Now keep in mind I’m just speculating, it’s possible that the officer hand his hand on his weapon, drew and fired, but that falls under heavy doubt based on the video.
Lin’s department and the State Attorney’s office cleared him of any wrong doing. In a deposition released by his department Lin had this to say,
“I feel bad for what happened, but I was not the cause of what happened.”
Stephens is suing the department, and his attorney Jack Scarola said that both he and Stephens decided to hold the release of the dash cam footage for over a year, because they were afraid it would spark the kind of racial unrest they saw in Ferguson.
Here is the video, judge for yourself.
