It has taken almost five months to fire four Houston police officers that shot and killed an emotionally disturbed man who was on the ground, wounded and incapacitated.
A graphic video of the April 21 shooting shows police officers firing 21 shots at 27-year-old Nicolas Chavez.
Police Chief Art Acevedo released the video to the public and announced the officers’ termination after an investigation into the incident. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
On Thursday, Acevedo said that Chavez had been incapacitated by multiple taser cartridges, bean bags, and three shots before the four officers fired their guns. Once Chavez was down, a total of 21 shots were let off in the final moments of the 15-minute encounter.
Seconds before the flurry of shots, Chavez is seen on video crawling and pulling at the wires from the police taser. An officer can be heard saying, “Don’t do it” before gunfire erupts. The police chief said the two cartridges in the taser had been discharged.
The local police union condemned the officers’ termination and said they would be appealing the decision.
CNN reports that even after repeated verbal warnings, the use of multiple soft impact rounds, and the two Tasers, the victim was still “armed with a metal object and began moving quickly toward” the officer who fired the first two shots. But Acevedo did say that the barrage of gunfire was unreasonable.
“The discharge of those 21 shots by those four members are not objectively reasonable,” he said. “I don’t consider them objectively reasonable; the chain of command does not consider them objectively reasonable, and I believe anyone that watches this … would see they had a lot of opportunities and a lot of other options readily available to them.”
Acevedo added, “You don’t get to shoot somebody 21 times because, at that time, when we discharged those 21 rounds, Mr. Chavez was at his greatest level of incapacitation.”
The incident was a result of several 911 calls about an apparently emotionally disturbed man jumping in front of vehicles and going into backyards. According to Acevedo, toxicology tests showed Chavez had methamphetamine, amphetamine, and ethanol in his system when he died.
“Edited” body camera footage showed officers pleading with Chavez to surrender. “Hey, bud, we’re here to help you, man,” one officer is heard saying.
The department deemed the use of taser cartridges, bean bags, and the three gunshots as “objectively reasonable” based on the situation and the facts of the case before the 21 shots were used.
“In this case, I have concluded there was no imminent threat to any police officer, and they could have returned home to their families,” an emotional Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters, adding that the firings were not an indictment of the entire 5,300-officer department. Yet still, the Houston Police Officers’ Union slammed the chief before the announcement of the findings.
The union’s argument was the length of the encounter and the fact that they tried to de-escalate the incident.
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Relatives of the victim told CNN affiliate KRPC that he was suffering a mental health crisis.
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