It’s an all-too-familiar and sickening story. An unarmed black man has an encounter with the police and is soon dead or dying on the ground. That’s what happened to Stephon Alonzo Clark Sunday night in Sacramento, California. The 22-year-old father of two was shot to death in his grandparents’ backyard by two officers who fired 20 shots.
Afterward, instead of the gun they seem to have thought Clark was pointing at them or a “toolbar” he was allegedly using to break windows, they found only a white cell phone near his body. Community outrage has been building all week. Hundreds of demonstrators marched and chanted late Thursday afternoon on a freeway that bisects the downtown of the state’s capital city.
Stephon Clark pictured with his sister.
Demonstrators later showed up to form a human chain around the Golden 1 Center and blocked all but about 2,000 ticket-holders from entering the arena to watch the Sacramento Kings play the Atlanta Hawks. At around 7:40 PM PT, Kings officials said they would let nobody else in and urged fans outside the arena to go home. They said there will be information about refunds at a later time. The protesters departed before 9 PM PT and police announced that “no arrests” had been made. Anita Chabria, Benjy Egel and Nashelly Chavez reported:
The demonstrators shouted Clark's name and said, "Hands up. Don’t shoot!"
"Stephon couldn't be here to watch a game. These people aren't going to be here to watch this game," said Brrazey Liberty, a musician and activist with Black Lives Matter.
"This is an epic day for black Sacramento," he said. "We feel like we had a victory today. Today was ours."
It was a different story for Clark and his family. He was shot after police said someone had been seen breaking car windows and the door of an unoccupied house nearby. In the video below captured by one of the officer’s body cameras, the two cops, whose names the Sacramento Police Department says will be released in 9 or 10 days, are seen searching the neighborhood on foot, using their flashlights and the intense spotlight from a helicopter overhead.
On Wednesday, the SPD showed the family and some friends videos of the shooting taken from body cameras of both officers and the police helicopter. They subsequently released these to the public. What they show is, to put it mildly, highly disturbing.
During a brief foot chase alongside the house, one officer shouts “Show me your hands! Gun!” The two officers reach the corner where the backyard begins and see Clark under a patio covering on the other side. Again one of them shouts “Show me your hands! Gun! Gun! Gun!” and less than a second later both officers blaze away, delivering 20 shots from their semi-automatic pistols. Time elapsed from when they first encounter Clark until they begin shooting? Eleven seconds. Until he lies motionless on the ground? Twenty-one seconds.
Without approaching him, the two cops continue several times in the next few minutes to ask Clark to show his hands. He’s not moving. Each assures the other that he has not been shot, one of them reloads his pistol while the other keeps his weapon trained on Clark. They keep their pistols unholstered and do not go near him until other officers and paramedics arrive, about six minutes later. An attempt is made then to give Clark CPR, but if there was a chance of saving his life, it is gone by then.
In the grandparents’ house, the shots are heard, but it is only later that his grandmother sees his body lying where he fell in the backyard.
Alex Horton and Wesley Lowery report:
“He was at the wrong place at the wrong time in his own back yard?” his grandmother, Sequita Thompson, told the Sacramento Bee. “C’mon, now, they didn’t have to do that.”
The Sacramento Police Department said the man they believed was breaking windows was the same man the officers killed in a hail of gunfire, identified by the 911 caller as a thin 6-foot male wearing a black hoodie and dark pants.
Police have yet to identify Clark as the suspect or victim.
Thompson said she thinks the window-breaker was someone else, not Clark, whom she described as being shorter than 6 feet.
After viewing them, Clark’s aunt, Saquoia Durham said:
"As soon as they did the command, they started shooting. They said 'put your hands up, gun' and then they just let loose on my nephew,” said Durham.
"They didn’t give him a chance to put his hands up or anything, and then when they shot him down, they knew they messed up,” she said.
The two officers are on paid administrative leave while an investigation of the shooting is underway.
[Although there is no gore in the following video, it may be too intense for some viewers. The segment in which the actual shooting occurs begins at about 7:45.]
