18 year old William Chapman
On April 22, 2015, we were clear that a Portsmouth, Virginia, police officer, Stephen Rankin, shot and killed unarmed 18-year-old William Chapman in a Walmart parking lot.
New autopsy results obtained by The Guardian not only confirm that he was shot in the face, but that it wasn't from a close distance as has been described.
The typical signs of a close- or body-contact shooting were not found around the bullet wounds William Chapman sustained in the head and chest when he was killed by Officer Stephen Rankin in the parking lot of a Walmart in Portsmouth on 22 April.
“There is no evidence of close-range fire to visual inspection,” wrote Wendy Gunther, an assistant chief medical examiner for Virginia. Gunther said a definitive ruling would be made by the state’s department of forensic sciences.
Furthermore, the autopsy results confirmed that Chapman was alcohol and drug free, and appears to call into question whether he ever stole anything from Walmart in the first place. In the autopsy report, no stolen items were listed in his personal belongings in spite of the implications by police that he stole something from the store and was confronted over it.
Walmart will not confirm or deny if anything was stolen and has stated that no security camera footage of the confrontation exists. Of course, no body camera was worn and no dash camera filmed anything. What's ridiculous, though, is the idea that William Chapman was fully prepared to die in that Walmart parking lot.
What we do know, without a doubt, is that the officer who shot and killed William Chapman is a stone-cold-killer.
The officer who killed Chapman is Stephen Rankin, who had been suspended from street patrol for nearly three years after he killed another unarmed man.
Chiefs only allowed Rankin to return to front line policing in March last year, almost three years after he killed an unarmed 26-year-old Kazakhstani immigrant in February 2011. Rankin was later found to have insulted the man and his family in other online postings.
A sergeant in the department at the time told the Guardian that senior commanders were formally warned by one of Rankin’s supervisors weeks before his first fatal shooting that he was “dangerous” and likely to cause someone harm.
Asked twice during a telephone interview why Rankin had been allowed to continue policing the public, Portsmouth police chief Edward Hargis repeated: “That’s a personnel matter and I can’t comment.” He added: “I’m not going to comment on what people may say, allegation-wise.”
In addition to this suspension and warnings from his superiors that he was likely to cause harm, Rankin had also been suspended for posting Nazi-inspired images and messages online. How can anyone with such a record be allowed to remain in public service?