USA: Police shoot and kill African American in wheelchair – World

Shock in California, where an African American with amputated legs and in a wheelchair was brutally killed by the police, rekindling the controversy over the excessive use of force by the agents a few weeks after the death of Tire Nichols in Memphis.

Anthony Lowe, 36, was shot dead in Huntington Park near Los Angeles shot by policemen who said they felt “threatened”: in a video, however, we see the man who, having abandoned his wheelchair, was only trying to escape with the help of his hands. His legs had been amputated following an earlier confrontation with police in Texas. The circumstances are not entirely clear but the agents would have changed their version of events as the days went by.

The incident occurred on January 26, when the police came to the rescue of a man stabbed repeatedly with a 30cm butcher knife. The injured man told officers he was attacked by a man in a wheelchair with a knife who then walked away. The manhunt started immediately and a few blocks away the police spotted Lowe armed with a knife. Officers then attempted to stop him but Lowe ignored commands and “threatened to stab them with the knife,” police said. Hence the decision to use the taser which, however, proved to be ineffective twice. And then to open fire and strike the man to death with one shot after another.

None of the officers had a bodycam given that the Huntington Park department does not use them and the police said they do not intend to publish the videos taken by cameras nearby. Only a few videos shot by passers-by circulate online of the incident. Images that seem at least in part to contradict the version of the agents, currently suspended for routine investigations.

Waiting to understand what really happened, the controversy rages, with Lowe’s family asking for justice and the charge of murder for the shooter. “They killed my son without legs and in a wheelchair,” denounced his mother Dorothy, referring to her son as “a good dad”, a man who was having a difficult time having his legs amputated last year . “We want justice,” echoed Cliff Smith of the Coalition Control Over the Police calling for the officers involved to be charged.

The Lowe family’s anger fuels American outrage against violent police and the increasingly pressing demand for a profound reform of the training of agents given that on too many occasions the reactions appear excessive as well as racist.

The case of Lowe is in fact added to the Shocking images of Nichols’ death in Memphis, Tennessee following a trivial traffic check. The unarmed African American boy was hit repeatedly by five officers (also African Americans) and left without help for 20 long minutes. Nichols died a few days later in hospital of hemorrhaging from the beatings. He was also present at the boy’s funeral in Memphis today Kamala Harris, the first African-American vice president in history, to testify to the White House’s support for the family. A support, that of Biden, which is accompanied by the divisions in Congress on a possible police reform that sees the Republicans and the Democrats engaged in a tug of war that has so far led to nothing.