Apparently the SWAT folks in Pine Bluff Arkansas couldn’t figure out a way to deal with a 107 holed up in a room with a handgun other than shoot him to death.
Granted, anybody with a handgun presents a challenge to peace officers, but when the perp is 107 years old and holed up in a room of a private residence, the first thing that might have occurred to the SWAT people is to play a waiting game.
As with most officer-involved shootings, the details presented to the public raise more questions than they answer. The old man, Monroe Isadore, had pointed a gun at two people in the home, prompting the call to the police, but Isadore allowed the two to exit to safety when the officers arrived. He then retreated to a bedroom. When police approached he fired through the closed bedroom door. No one was injured.
Subsequently police snaked a video camera into the room which determined that Isadore was in fact armed with a handgun. SWAT officials assert they fired “gas” into the room when “negotiations didn’t work”, and then Isadore fired at officers and they fired back, killing him.
The question I have is—if Monroe Isadore was isolated in a bedroom of a private home, and police were in sensible defensive positions because he had discharged his weapon once at them already, how was it that the police later exposed themselves so that Isadore could fire on them again, providing a rationale for the blaze of gunfire that killed him? If they already had a camera in the room and could observe what he was doing, how could he have made any sort of move that was not telegraphed far in advance? Seems to me a good plan would have been to just keep talking to the guy, even if it went nowhere. Sooner or later a 107-year-old is going to nod off and drop his gun.
I hate to second-guess the police. It takes bravery to know there’s a man with a gun up ahead and to go deliberately to meet the threat. I don’t mean to badmouth them here, but vital parts of the puzzle of this man’s death are missing.