UPDATED: November 6, 2015 4:00 PM EST
Police investigating the fatal shooting of a 6-year-old Louisiana boy at the hands of police announced that the child’s father, Chris Few, may have been unarmed during the shooting.
According to the New York Times:
Col. Mike Edmonson, the head of state police, said at a news conference in Marksville on Thursday that no gun was found inside Few’s vehicle. He said the investigation was just beginning and there were “a lot of unanswered questions” but investigators would be methodical in seeking out the facts.
Few’s 57-year-old stepfather, Morris German, accused the city marshals of indiscriminately opening fire on the vehicle. German said Few was heavily sedated, unable to talk and has bullet fragments lodged in his brain and lung. He described Few as a loving father and added the man’s son “was his whole life.”
While many police departments have a moving vehicle policy recommended by the Justice Department — a measure that prohibits them from shooting at moving vehicles — it’s unclear is Marksville has the practice in place.
We’ll keep you updated with the latest.
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Louisiana State Police are investigating an incident that led to a 6-year-old’s death at the hands of police.
Jeremy Mardis was shot and killed by police while sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle officers were pursuing Tuesday. Chris Few, Jeremy’s father and the driver of the vehicle, was critically wounded in the shooting.
The child was struck in his head and chest, The Huffington Post reports.
Avoyelles Parish Coroner Dr. L. J. Mayeux told The Associated Press that Few reached a dead end during the chase, at which point he attempted to reverse the car into the officers. The officers then “discharged their weapons” at the vehicle, Louisiana State Police said.
“More likely than not they were shooting into the driver side, and he was on the passenger side,” Mayeux told the AP. “He was in the line of fire.”
The child, his grandmother Samantha Few told WAFB, was living with autism.
“Jeremy was a special gift from God,” she said. “He was always smiling always happy. He was diagnosed with autism when he was 2. He loved everyone he met and they loved him. As far as what caused his death, the only thing I have been told is he died from gun shot wounds. He didn’t deserve what happened. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
In recent months, the faces we often see associated with police shootings and violence are those of color. Historically, Black communities have long endured living under the scourge of a system that so very often views them as invaluable or disposable, leading to their hyper-incarceration and in the worst of cases, dead.
The truth is, Black communities are disproportionately targeted by police, but statistics show that police nationwide aren’t limiting their scope. According to The Guardian’s The Counted, a database that uses a crowdsourcing system to build a comprehensive record of deaths at the hands of officers, police killed 95 people in the month of October. That’s ten percent of the number of people killed in 2015 alone.
We still have two more months to go.
And sadly, police fatally shot a 6-year-old child, making Jeremy Mardis the youngest person to be killed by police this year and proving that police practices across the board should be examined, no matter which communities they’re serving.
Police violence, it seems, transcends race.
For more information on police killings this year, see here.
SOURCE: Huffington Post | VIDEO SOURCE: Inform
SEE ALSO:
Michigan Police Apologize For Handcuffing 7-Year-Old Boy With ADHD In School
By The Numbers: 95 People Were Killed By Police In October
