Photograph: Jocelyn Hansen
Another story to add to our ever-growing folder on excessive force and police brutality.
A Preliminary autopsy states that the young man was shot in the back corroborating eyewitness’ account that the man was running away from police. You wanna know what was the Police account of the shooting? They said the young man was coming towards them with a sword, so they shot him in the back?
Huh? How… wa… I don’t… *sigh*
ThinkProgress reports that last Wednesday, 22-year-old Darrien Hunt was shot dead by police in Saratoga Springs, Utah, about 35 miles south of Salt Lake City.
For three days, police said nothing about the cause of the shooting while witnesses reported that he was running away as officers shot outside a Panda Express. On Saturday, police issued a brief statement saying he lunged at them with a sword. But Hunt’s lawyer says an independent autopsy shows Hunt was shot in the back and not in the front, and his mother Susan Hunt says the “sword” was a blunt-edged vanity version of a Japanese “Katana” sword he bought at an Asian gift shop.
“Those stupid cops thought they had to murder over a toy,” Susan Hunt told the Associated Press. The family’s lawyer, Randall K. Edwards, declined requests from the Los Angeles Times to provide the name of pathologist who performed the alleged autopsy, or to provide a copy of the autopsy.
Hunt told the Associated Press that she returned to Utah recently after separating from her husband and fleeing an abusive relationship, to start a new life with her children. She said Darrien was coping with the separation and looking for jobs in Saratoga Springs
