UPDATED: 10:20 a.m. ET —
A man who was identified as the husband of the Los Angeles district attorney was shown on a video pulling a gun on Black Lives Matter activists in front of their home on Monday morning. David Lacey, who is married to Los Angeles’ chief prosecutor, Jackie Lacey, wielded the gun and threatened to shoot if the activists didn’t get off his property.
The jarring video was posted Monday morning by Jasmyne Cannick, a candidate for Los Angeles County Central Committee, which she described on her website as “people who function essentially as the Board of Directors for the Los Angeles County Democratic Party.” Cannick tweeted that the Black Lives Matter activists were protesting Lacey in front of her house when her husband opened the door and threatened to shoot them.
“Get off!” Lacey can be seen telling people off-camera while pointing a handgun directly at them, aiming from side to side.
“Good morning,” Dr. Melina Abdullah, an activist with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, can be heard saying.
“Get off of my porch!” Lacey says with his gun aimed steadily.
“Are you going to shoot me?” Abdullah asks incredulously.
“I will shoot you,” he said. “Get off of my porch!”
“Can you tell Jackie Lacey that we’re here?” Abdullah asks in an even-toned voice, clearly undeterred.
“I don’t care who you are,” Lacey says, finally lowering his gun to his right side. “Get off of my porch! Right now!”
He then threatened to call the police while raising his gun back in an aiming position.
Watch the troubling video below:
The Black Lives Matter Los Angeles activists knocked on the Laceys’ door because, as Cannick tweeted, they have “been trying to meet with their elected District Attorney for years. She hasn’t met with the Black community since 2016.”
Cannick, who as a news reporter in 2016 sued the Los Angeles Police Department and police chief over a false arrest in 2014, also tweeted in the same thread that Lacey “agreed to meet with the Black community BEFORE the end of the year in October and that never happened.”
Chances are that the Black Lives Matter activists wanted to discuss the district attorney’s re-election bid in a county where Black and brown residents say they have been disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. Lacey has developed a reputation for not defending those same Black and brown lives caught up in the criminal justice system.
That seemed to be true for why it took so long to prosecute Ed Buck, the wealthy and white Democratic donor who had two Black men die from apparent drug overdoses within 18 months of each other at his home in West Hollywood, California. An unidentified 37-year-old man also overdosed in Buck’s home in September, but he survived.
It was only after that most recent overdose that Buck, 65 was finally charged, although it was only for drug possession. There are reportedly at least 10 other victims.
Cannick also tweeted about that back in November.
At the time, Lacey seemed to be blaming everyone else for why Buck was able to stay on the street and avoid criminal charges for so long.
Back in September, the mother of one of Buck’s victims, Gemmel Moore, slammed Lacey for not doing her job.
“That’s all I ever wanted from the beginning was for Jackie Lacey to do her job,” LaTisha Nixon said in a video. “I didn’t ask for no special favors. I just asked for her to do her job — that was it.”
She continued: “Everything was in front of her. We tried to deliver ballots. They treated us like we were criminals. Jackie Lacey wouldn’t let us in the office — nothing.”
Watch the video below.
Nixon is suing Buck and Lacey “for their violation of Gemmel Moore’s civil rights in their race-based refusal to prosecute Ed Buck, which ultimately resulted in the Jan. 7, 2019 death of Timothy Dean under almost identical circumstances that should and could have been prevented,” according to a press release.
Moore is the 26-year-old who was found dead in Buck’s home on July 27, 2017. It is alleged by Moore’s mother that Buck “injected her son with a lethal dose of crystal methamphetamine,” CNN.com reported. “The complaint describes Buck as a wealthy white man who ‘had a predatory and injurious system of soliciting Black men and watching them cling to life.’ It accuses him of wrongful death, sexual battery and assault and says he was not prosecuted ‘because he is white, and because Mr. Moore was Black.’”
Moore’s death was initially called an accidental methamphetamine overdose. However, the Los Angeles Times reported that Moore wrote in a journal a few months before he died that he was using drugs and “Ed Buck is the one to thank. He gave me my first injection of chrystal [sic] meth.”
On July 4 of 2017, 23 days before Moore died, an escort reported Buck to authorities for drugging Black men, but nothing was done. After Moore died, Buck’s apartment was searched. Law enforcement allegedly “found the following items in Buck’s two-bedroom apartment: 24 syringes with brown residue, five glass pipes with white residue and burn marks, a plastic straw with possible white residue, clear plastic bags with white powdery residue and a clear plastic bag with a ‘piece of crystal-like substance.’”
In January, Timothy Dean, 55, was found dead in Buck’s home.
Buck claims he went to take a shower and found Dean unresponsive when he returned.
“The witness reported that he did not see the decedent taking any drugs and they did not have sex,” according to the report. However, the coroner’s report also says Dean died on a living room floor on a mattress “littered with drug paraphernalia and sex toys.” Even more disturbing, Buck waited 15 minutes before calling 911.
It was reported that Dean died of a methamphetamine overdose.
In early October, Buck was indicted by a federal grand jury “that charged him with two counts of distributing methamphetamine resulting in deaths of Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean,” according to a press release.
“Ed Buck also faces three counts of distributing methamphetamine to men in May 2018, December 2018 and last month,” the press release also stated. “Each of these three charges carries a maximum statutory penalty of 20 years in federal prison.” He is facing life in prison.
Black Lives Matter Los Angeles also challenged Lacey back in 2018 when the group ramped up its fight against the failure to prosecute police officers who fatally shoot people of color. At the time, Lacey’s office had not brought charges against any officer involved in an on-duty shooting in more than 15 years in Los Angeles County, where more than 300 residents had been killed by cops or had died in police custody since she was elected in 2012.
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