The Jacksonville, Fla. Sheriff’s Office on Friday released officer-worn body camera recordings which captured audio, but not video, of the police shooting and killing of Michael Hughes, 32, at an Argyle Forest hotel last month.
Hughes, whose family described him as a loving person who was battling a mental illness, was fatally shot by Officer J.H. Wing at a Quality Inn on March 30 following a struggle where Hughes was able to wrestle control of Wing’s Taser away from the officer and stun him, according to a police press conference. But the recording indicates a critical gap between two volleys of gunfire which an attorney for the Hughes family has vowed to exploit.
Wing and another officer were responding to a call about a domestic disturbance dispute between Hughes and his girlfriend for the fourth time that day, local television station WJXT reported earlier this month. According to the report, Hughes had left the hotel room earlier in the day but then forced his way back in and refused to leave, even after the officers arrived at the scene.
The body camera footage shows what happened in the moments just before Hughes and the officers began grappling.
The officers tell Hughes that they plan on detaining him until he can be properly identified. Hughes says he’s “straight,” but an officer replies, “No, you’re not straight.”
As the officers reach for Hughes, he immediately pulls away and says, “back up; don’t touch me” to the officers.
The beginning of the struggle is shown on camera before the officer’s body cam falls to the ground. The video goes dark, but a microphone captured audio for the remainder of the encounter.
The fight continues for about 60 seconds, with Hughes repeatedly yelling “Get off me. Get off me,” throughout. Then Hughes can be heard saying, “Okay,” and seconds later one of the officers yells, “He’s reaching for my Taser! He’s reaching for my Taser!” followed by, “He’s got my Taser! He’s got my Taser!”
A second later the sound of the Taser discharging can be heard for approximately two seconds. Two gunshots occurred in quick succession.
“Shoot him!” someone yells several times.
Three more gunshots go off approximately twenty seconds after the original two shots.
The officers immediately call in “shots fired” and a female voice, presumably Hughes’s girlfriend can be heard yelling “What the fuck!” and pleading to come in the room.
One of the officers asks Hughes if he was hit by the bullets and where he was hit. Hughes [Should be Officer Wing], audibly out of breath after the struggle and after being tased, speaks to police dispatch and says, “I have been tased. He has been 18’ed,” which is code for a person suffering a gunshot wound.
The officers then say they’re going to “cuff him” and then “cover him and then we’re gonna apply first aid.”
Attorney Marwan Porter, who is representing Hughes’s family in the matter, said Thursday that he believed there was more to the story than authorities were letting on, according to a Friday report from WJXT. Porter claimed to have a “witness [who] believes it was Wing who stunned Hughes and then shot him twice in the lower extremities inside the hotel room. Porter said those wounds were not life-threatening but left Hughes disoriented and stumbling and no longer a threat,” the station reported. “Porter said that when police and Hughes exited the hotel room, there was a time gap, and that’s when Wing shot Hughes three more times, killing him. He said that’s when JSO should have defused the situation.”
Porter is demanding that all video of the incident be released, including the other officer’s body camera and hotel surveillance footage (Lambe 1-2).
Porter said there are two body camera videos -- one of the cameras stopped working and the other fell to the ground. Porter said he was able to review the video and said you can initially see the officers approach Hughes inside the hotel room and hear a struggle as they try to restrain him.
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Porter said there was a gap in time and more shots were fired outside the hotel room. He said those shots weren’t heard on the body camera.
Porter has also been shown one hotel surveillance video but said the State Attorney’s Office hasn’t yet shown him a second hotel surveillance video, and he’s demanding that in the name of transparency. Porter said the key question is what happened outside the hotel room?
As of right now, Porter doesn’t feel the shooting is justified and said there’s a “strong possibility” the officer could be charged (Peel 1).
Tears streaming down her face, Dawn Johnson demanded to know why a Jacksonville police officer shot and killed her boyfriend a week ago during a domestic incident at a Youngerman Circle hotel.
Surrounded by the family of Michael Leon Hughes and the attorneys they hired to investigate the death of the 32-year-old father of her two children, she said her call to police for help on March 30 "was not supposed to go that way!"
She also disputed what police said at the scene that Hughes threatened to kill the officers who came to handle the fourth domestic dispute call at that same Quality Inn room within several hours.
"Michael never said 'I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill you,'" said Johnson, who was there when the shooting occurred.
"That is a lie," she said. "I want bodycam too. I want to know why if Michael was such a threat didn't the other officer not pull his Taser? ... Why did they have to shoot him so many times?"
Hughes' father joined the attorneys demanding all officer bodycam, police car dashcam and motel security video so he can see his son "from the time he was alive until the time he lay on the ground with blood coming out of his head." He wants closure in his son's death, he said.
"I want to know why they shot my son, my only son, in the face, then the stomach and chest and the butt," said Timothy Hughes, who said he just drove to Jacksonville from Charlotte, N.C. "... I would also like to know why the police had two Tasers, two pepper sprays and two batons, but they could not arrest one Black man with no violence and no weapon?"
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Attorney Marwan Porter said Johnson called police to "de-escalate the situation, to calm it down." He said Hughes had a mental illness, and it should have been dealt with in a less lethal manner.
"You have to understand that everything isn't clicking the way it is supposed to be clicking and you have to be patient with them and have to go into it with a plan, otherwise it is going to end bad," Porter said.
Porter demanded a "transparent investigation" of the death as his law firm does its own investigation. He said his requests to the State Attorney's Office for the video have not been answered. The State Attorney's Office investigates all Jacksonville officer-involved shootings for criminal infractions before the Sheriff's Office investigates for officer misconduct.
"We love our officers. But our officers must make proper decisions, and the training has to be proper so this does not continue to happen," Porter said.
Sheriff's Office spokesman Christian Hancock said no new information will be released at this time.
"This continues to be an active investigation, both within JSO and externally through the State Attorney's Office," he said.
State Attorney's Office spokesman David Chapman said his office is still investigating and had no update on any police video for now (Scanlan 1-2).
[Paste the following on Google to watch and hear the confrontation. The video is located at the beginning of the article]
Works cited:
Lambe, Jerry. “Body Camera Captures Sound of Police Shooting and Killing Man Accused of Tasing an Officer.” Law and Crime, April 24, 2021. Net. https://lawandcrime.com/police/body-camera-captures-sound-of-police-shooting-and-killing-man-accused-of-tasing-an-officer/
Peel, Corley. “Attorney Believes Deadly Shooting of Man by Jacksonville Police Was Not Justified.” News 4 JAX, April 22, 2021. Net. https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2021/04/22/attorney-believes-deadly-shooting-of-man-by-jacksonville-police-was-not-justified/
Scanlan, Dan. “Family Demands Jacksonville Police Release All Video in March 30 Officer-Involved Death.” Floride Times-Union, updated April 9, 2021. Net. https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/crime/2021/04/06/family-demands-all-jso-video-fatal-shooting-jacksonville-hotel/7111016002/
A replica gun that reportedly was held by a man fatally shot by a Daly City police officer during a struggle for the weapon on April 7
Roger Cornelius Allen, a 44-year-old Black man who lived in San Francisco, was fatally shot by a police officer in Daly City, California during a routine check of an occupied parked vehicle on April 7.
San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe revealed Tuesday that Allen was shot by a Daly City police officer after they saw what they believed was a firearm in his lap. The weapon turned out to be a BB gun.
Few details about the incident had been released by Daly City Police prior to the district attorney's account Tuesday.
According to Wagstaffe, the incident took place April 7 on the 700 block of Niantic Avenue when an officer saw three people in a parked truck with a damaged rear tire around 2:30 p.m. and stopped to speak to the driver about possibly needing assistance. The officer was joined by another officer on the driver's side of the vehicle.
Two men were seated in the front of the truck, with Allen in the front passenger's seat, while a woman was in the back seat. While the officer spoke to the driver, two other officers approached the passenger side of the vehicle, where the front passenger door was open, Wagstaffe said.
According to the district attorney, the officers "saw what appeared to be a Glock firearm" on Allen's lap. The officers "yelled out there was a gun and Mr. Allen picked the gun up and held it in his hand."
Wagstaffe said a struggle ensued after one of the officers on the passenger's side leaned in and grabbed Allen's hand in a bid to prevent the gun from being fired. At one point the weapon was directed at the officer and driver on the other side of the truck and then at the officer struggling with Allen.
According to Wagstaffe, one of the officers on the passenger side "reported he feared that his fellow officer was going to be shot in the face," when he "saw the gun pointed at the face of the officer struggling with Mr. Allen."
Wagstaffe said: "He fired his service handgun at Mr. Allen twice, with one shot striking Mr. Allen in the chest and the other shot missing and lodging inside the vehicle."
The suspected firearm was actually "a replica handgun that was stamped with the word Glock" and is not a firearm, Wagstaffe said.
"There was no orange tape around the tip of the gun to show that it was not a real firearm," according to Wagstaffe.
Allen was administered emergency aid before being taken to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital where he died around 90 minutes later, according to the district attorney's account.
The driver and another passenger, who described themselves as acquaintances of Allen, were not injured in the incident. They were released after being interviewed by police. They have been cooperating with investigators, according to Wagstaffe.
There is no video evidence of the incident and "Daly City police officers are not presently equipped with body cameras," Wagstaffe said. It is unknown why police dash cameras did not record the incident.
The name of the officer who fatally shot Allen has not been released. He has been placed on paid administrative leave during the investigation, according to Wagstaffe.
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Allen grew up in San Francisco, according to his father, who said they last spoke about a month earlier. He said the district attorney's account of his son having a gun was "not like him," The Mercury News of the San Francisco Bay Area reported.
"I don't want my son to be forgotten," the father told The Mercury News. "He wasn't perfect; none of us are perfect. Other than that, he was an easygoing person" (Kim 1-2).
Daly City officials changed course Thursday and identified four officers at the scene of the fatal police shooting of Roger Allen, after facing backlash for initially refusing to release the names.
The officers are identified as Lt. Michael Brennan and officers Rosa Brenes, Nicholas McCarthy and Cameron Newton, according to a statement from the city. Officials have not said how each of the officers was involved and which of them is the officer who discharged his firearm.
Daly City officials did not immediately respond to a request for further information.
… His killing has since prompted protests in both Daly City and San Francisco and renewed calls for the Daly City Police Department to equip its officers with body-worn cameras.
As of last Friday, authorities said they had not recovered any video of the shooting.
In the three weeks after the shooting, Daly City police and officials had declined to name the officers at the scene citing an open investigation into the incident by the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office. However, similar investigations into other police shootings by law enforcement in San Mateo County have not stopped those agencies from identifying officers (Barba 1).
Family members of a Daly City man are still looking for answers nearly a month after he was shot and killed by police.
44-year-old Roger Allen was shot during what investigators say was a struggle over a fake gun.
Roger Allen’s sister says she’s enraged and upset. She misses her brother, and she’s angry it took police so long to release the names of the officers involved.
“It hurt because that was the last person that I had left in my family,” Talika Fletcher said.
… She feels alone.
“My brother was an amazing person. He was outgoing, funny, he could light up a whole entire room.”
Investigators say Allen was killed after a struggle over a fake gun.
“A cop should know a BB-gun from a real gun.”
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Daly City police officers are not equipped with body-worn camera but Fletcher says she believes video will still come out.
“In that area people have rings, they have cameras on their houses. They have video. The truth will come out” (Hari 1).
City officials have formally requested that California Attorney General Rob Bonta conduct an independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting of Roger Cornelius Allen by Daly City police officers during a traffic stop on Apr. 7.
The city also plans to hire an outside expert to lead the administrative investigation that includes reviewing whether the officers complied with police policies, procedures and tactics.
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None of the four officers involved were wearing body cameras at the time of the shooting. In the wake of the shooting, Daly City officials have approved funding to purchase body cameras for all their officers.
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On July 1, 2021, Assembly Bill 1506 goes into effect, providing Bonta’s office with the ability to take over investigations into officer-involved shootings of unarmed civilians (Daly 1-2).
Works cited:
Barba, Michael. “Amid Pressure, Daly City Releases Names of Officers in Roger Allen Police Shooting.” San Francisco Examiner, April 29, 2021. Net. https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/amid-pressure-daly-city-releases-names-of-officers-in-roger-allen-police-shooting/
“Daly City Officials Ask State Attorney General To Investigate Officer-Involved Shooting of Roger Allen.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2021. Net. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/05/18/roger-allen-fake-gun-daly-city-officer-involved-shooting/
Hari, Amanda. “Family Demands Answers after Daly City Police Shoot, Kill Man with BB Gun.” KRON4, updated May 4, 2021. Net. https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/family-of-daly-city-man-fatally-shot-by-police-demands-answers/
Kim, Soo. “Who is Roger Allen? Black Man Shot Dead by Daly City Police Officer.” Newsweek, April 16, 2021. Net. https://www.newsweek.com/roger-allen-shot-dead-daly-city-police-officer-california-bay-area-1584252
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