Minnesota police shooting - A Minnesota woman claims police shot her boyfriend for no apparent reason as she live streamed the aftermath that was shared on social media late Wednesday in the St. Paul suburb of Falcon Heights.
The shooting happened during a traffic stop after the man told a police officer that he was carrying a licensed gun. The girlfriend of the victim, identified as 32-year-old Philando Castile, was shot as he reached for his wallet to produce identification to the officer.
Police did not have details about the reason for the stop. No one else was injured. Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend, said they were stopped for a broken tail light.
The Associated Press could not verify the authenticity of the video, although it appeared to be genuine. Relatives of Castile joined several people at the scene and outside the hospital where he had died.
Castile was a cafeteria supervisor at a Montessori school in Minnesota. Castile’s mother told CNN she suspected she would never learn the whole truth about her son’s death in the police shooting and said they “are being hunted.”
“I think he was just black in the wrong place,” Valerie Castile said. “I know my son … we know black people have been killed … I always told them, whatever you do when you get stopped by police, comply, comply, comply.”
The officer involved in the police shooting has been placed on paid administrative leave. Castile’s cousin, Antonio Johnson, told the Star Tribune that because Castile was a black man driving in a largely middle-class suburb, he “was immediately criminally profiled and he lost his life over it.”
The place where the shooting took place is close to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. It is also not fair from the campus of the University of Minnesota.
About 200 protesters were seen at Gov. Mark Dayton’s mansion demanding justice and immediate action. The next morning, about 50 protesters remained outside despite rain.
The video posted Wednesday night on Facebook Live shows the woman in a car next to a bloodied man slumped in a seat following the police shooting. It also shows a distraught armed police officer standing at the car swearing at Reynolds to keep her hands “where they are.”
“I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his hand out,” the officer told Castile’s girlfriend. But Reynolds responded back, “You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir.”
