Washington.- A white police officer from Grand Rapids (Michigan) killed an unarmed black man with a shot to the head after a struggle for a traffic stop, as shown by the videos published by the authorities in recent hours and collected by local media.
The incident occurred on April 4, when an agent stopped the vehicle in which Patrick Lyoya was traveling, 26 years old and originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
After getting out of the vehicle, the two began to argue, Lyoya ran out and they both struggled on the ground. by the control of a taser gun that are designed to give electric shock and immobilize the recipient.
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At one point in the struggle, the policeman placed his knee on Lyoya’s back and shot him in the back of the head.
The Grand Rapids Police published on Wednesday the four videos in which you can see what happened and that include images recorded by the cameras that police officers wear on their uniformsas well as the video recorded by a person traveling in Lyoya’s car.
Police have not identified the officer involved.who is on paid leave while the investigation is taking place.
Well-known civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents Lyoya’s family, has demanded that the police officer be fired and criminally investigated.
“This video clearly shows that this was an unnecessary use of force.excessive and fatal to an unarmed black man who was confused by the encounter and terrified for his life,” Crump said in a statement.
At the time of the traffic stop, the officer asked Lyoya if he spoke English and asked for his driver’s license, at which point the argument began.
Lyoya, who had two daughters, was a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo and had arrived in the US with his family in 2014, fleeing violence in his country of origin, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, explained in a statement.
The city of Grand Rapids, about 230 kilometers from Detroit, has about 200,000 inhabitants, of which 18% are African American, according to census data.
After the footage became public, hundreds of people demonstrated outside the Grand Rapids Police Department.
The United States experienced the biggest protests against racism in the summer of 2020 since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in the late 1960s.
These demonstrations were a reaction to the murder in Minneapolis (Minnesota) in May 2020 of the African-American George Floyd, suffocated by a white police officer.
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Source-www.debate.com.mx