Mentally Handicapped Man Killed by LA County SWAT Proven Innocent

Donnell Thompson was mentally handicapped man aged 27, but with the mental abilities of someone much younger.

As Michael E. Miller with The Washington Post reported earlier today:

It was not yet dawn when the armored vehicles, black and hulking like Batmobiles, rumbled into the residential neighborhood in Compton, Calif. A carjacker had stolen a vehicle in Los Angeles, exchanged gunfire with sheriff’s deputies and then ditched his prize, disappearing on foot into a dense patchwork quilt of pink houses.

The armored vehicles —and the heavily armed deputies inside them —were there to find and capture the armed carjacker.

Instead, they found a different black man, Donnell Thompson.

As the carjacker hid in a house several blocks away, Thompson slept in a stranger’s yard.

Mr. Thompson had a clean criminal record and was unarmed.

From inside one of the armored vehicles, however, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies knew none of this. When Thompson didn’t respond to commands, the deputies detonated flash-bangs. When he still didn’t move, they hit him with foam bullets.

And when he allegedly ran toward them, a deputy atop the armored vehicle opened fire with an assault rifle, striking Thompson twice in the torso.

Thompson died. At almost the same instant, the real carjacker was arrested.

That was July 28. For almost two weeks, the Sheriff’s Department insisted that Thompson was a second suspect in the carjacking.

On Tuesday, August 9th, the department admitted it had killed an innocent man.

“No question this is a terribly devastating event,” Capt. Steve Katz said during a news conference. He said there was “no physical evidence” connecting Thompson to the carjacking or shootout and promised a “thorough” and “complete” investigation into the shooting, according to the Associated Press.

Thompson’s relatives said they wanted more than an investigation, however. They wanted charges for the deputy who killed Thompson.

“I wouldn’t treat an animal this bad,” his sister Matrice Stanley told the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, according to the AP. “How is this justifiable?”

Donnell Thompson died because of over zealous policing. He was asleep in a yard, which granted was not his own, but he was unarmed. If the police had taken more time to attempt to identify this man or allow him to wake up and respond to their commands, he would still be alive.

Watch the video below…

(Article by Jaimes Campbell)