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NY Times, Mar. 10 2015
Georgia Investigators Look Into Police Shooting of Naked, Unarmed Man
By RICHARD FAUSSET
CHAMBLEE, Ga. — A witness to the fatal police shooting of a naked,
unarmed man here said Tuesday that the man had approached the officer
with his hands in the air, prompting the frightened officer to shoot at
close range with a handgun.
The witness, Pedro Castillo, 43, is a maintenance man at the Heights at
Chamblee, the apartment complex northeast of Atlanta where Anthony Hill,
27, was shot and killed Monday afternoon. Mr. Castillo, speaking
Spanish, said that Mr. Hill, a black man, had seemed out of sorts. He
was naked and on all fours in the parking lot when the police officer,
who is white, arrived in his squad car, parking a good distance away.
Mr. Castillo said.
When Mr. Hill saw the officer, Mr. Castillo said, he stood up and moved
toward him with his hands raised, and the officer, obviously frightened,
yelled for him to stop. Mr. Castillo said that he had not seen a
scuffle, but that he did see the officer pull out the handgun and shoot
Mr. Hill.
In a news conference on Monday, Cedric L. Alexander, the DeKalb County
deputy chief operating officer for public safety, said the officer had
had a Taser at the time. He said he did not know whether the officer had
used it.
Mr. Castillo said that while it seemed to him that the officer did not
have to shoot Mr. Hill, the officer “did have to defend himself” because
Mr. Hill did not stop when ordered to do so.
The incident is the third fatal police shooting of an unarmed or
apparently unarmed black man in the last five days, following shootings
in Aurora, Colo., and Madison, Wis. — and as the nation continues to
debate matters of race, policing, and lethal force in the wake of the
fatal shooting of another unarmed black man, Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Mo., in August.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is examining the shooting, and the
officer was placed on administrative leave pending the results of the
investigation.
By Tuesday morning, the news had already spurred a rash of outraged
comments on Twitter, and grief and anger here at the Heights, a complex
of dun-colored apartments rented mostly by working-class Latino
families. A number of mothers here, who would not give their names
because they are undocumented immigrants, said Mr. Hill had been a
friendly and well-known presence in the complex who often played soccer
with their children and picked up trash in a nearby play area.
Julio Hernandez, 54, a groundskeeper at the complex, said Mr. Hill, who
went by “Tony,” used to skateboard around the complex with Mr.
Hernandez’s 14 year-old son. He said he had never seen Mr. Hill act
aggressive or appear to be intoxicated.
“He was a calm, friendly person,” Mr. Hernandez said. “To me, this was
police abuse, because what can a naked person do?”
However, a number of people here said Mr. Hill seemed troubled on
Tuesday. Some of them assumed he might be high on drugs, or mentally ill
and lacking a stabilizing medication.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Harrietta Jones, 62, the cousin of Mr.
Hill’s mother, said that Mr. Hill had been a veteran of the Air Force
who had been treated by the Veteran’s Administration. “To my
understanding he was having some difficulties with the medication that
he was on,” said Ms. Jones, who lives in Moncks Corner, S.C.
Ms. Jones verified a 2009 news report that Mr. Hill graduated from basic
training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio in 2009.
Ivan Lara, 43, a painter working at the complex, said that he saw Mr.
Hill outside, wearing a pair of shorts and lying face down, shortly
after 12:15 or 12:30 p.m., and assumed that he was exercising. But when
Mr. Hill lifted his head, his speech was indecipherable, and Mr. Lara
assumed that something was wrong.
Later, Mr. Lara said, Mr. Hill removed all of his clothes and began
repeatedly jumping off his second floor balcony. Workers at the rental
office called 911. Mr. Lara said one of the workers at the complex had
tried to calm Mr. Hill, and the pair hugged for some time.
Mr. Lara did not see the shooting, but he said he had heard what he
thought were three loud bangs. He followed the sounds and found the
officer holding and touching Mr. Hill. “I saw his face,” Mr. Lara said,
referring to the policeman. “He was very scared. The cop said, ‘You saw
what happened, right?’ ”
When a neighbor Adriana Gomez, 21, returned from her job at a Mexican
restaurant just after 2 p.m., she said, she saw Mr. Hill lying in the
street, with emergency personnel all around and a police officer crying.
“Maybe he chose the wrong weapon, I don’t know,” Ms. Gomez said. “That’s
the question everybody’s asking.”
One resident of the apartment complex, Xochi Macedoia, 27, said she had
seen Mr. Hill running toward the police officer from more than 20 yards
away. But that from her vantage, she said, she could not see what
happened when Mr. Hill got close.
Another resident, a woman who did not want her name published because
she is an undocumented immigrant, said she had seen the incident unfold
from her balcony. She said Mr. Hill was walking, not running, toward the
policeman. She said Mr. Hill had had his hands at his sides, and raised
them parallel to the ground, but did not raise them above his head. She
said the two men had not fought before Mr. Hill was shot.
On Tuesday morning, a pair of camouflage shorts were wadded up in front
of the door to Mr. Hill’s apartment. Tiffany R. Smith, 25, an
African-American resident of Atlanta, was wandering the apartment
complex with a camera and a red rose. Ms. Smith said she had not known
Mr. Hill, but just wanted answers.
“To be naked and unarmed and killed, I don’t understand, she said. “I
came here to get some peace and try to understand.”
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