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Police in Indianapolis chased and shot a young Black man, presumably in the back, on Wednesday evening in the latest instance of preventable violence by law enforcement against African Americans. Sean Reed was live streaming himself on Facebook at the time that he was shot. But what police apparently did not know was that even after they shot and killed him and even shared a joke over his dead body, they were still being recorded by the Facebook Live session Reed started before he died.

The episode unfolded as the country was reeling from seeing vigilante justice from two white men in Georgia go unpunished after they hunted down a young Black man and shot and killed him in broad daylight under the inexplicable pretenses of making a citizen’s arrest.

Footage of the 21-year-old man’s killing quickly went viral on social media. They follow below. Please use discretion in watching and listening to the videos.

First is the video of Reed running away from police. Dozens of shots can be heard being fired as Reed flees. Before he starts running, Reed parks his car and can be heard pleading to someone, “Please come get me!”

Next comes the video of cops heard joking and mocking his appearance after shooting him by saying that it will be a “closed casket” funeral.

 

A subsequent interview with a police spokesperson suggested that he was trying to get his story straight.

According to the Indianapolis Star, Reed was driving up to 90 miles per hour when police began chasing him. However, police said they stopped their pursuit because the speeds could endanger others. But when an officer saw Reed’s car driving later on and got out of the police cruiser, that’s supposedly when Reed got out and began running, cops said.

The shooting sparked a peacefully demonstration of about 100 people at the scene of the shooting Wednesday night.

Reed’s family said that as of Wednesday night they still had not received any official information about the shooting from police.

Photos of Reed on social media showed him wearing a U.S. military uniform and a tweet from someone who said they were friends and that Reed was a “U.S. Veteran.”

The shooting came as Georgia was under scrutiny for what appeared to be the coverup of a vigilante shooting by two white men of an unarmed Black man in Brunswick, Georgia. Ahmaud Arbery was racially profiled, hunted down and lynched to death by a father and son who have been protected by the state’s law about citizen’s arrests. That shooting has stoked the flames of suspicion about the disparity in reactions by law enforcement to the killing of an unarmed Black man. While that shooting wasn’t done by police, there have been no arrests or charges in that case, prompting outrage across the country. Wednesday’s shooting of Reed certainly didn’t help those matters any.

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