A woman who ran to the scene after police fatally shot 17-year-old Jessica Hernandez on Monday said she tried to film the aftermath of the killing but was told “don’t you dare” by a police officer.
Brianna Diaz, whose house was near the scene of the shooting and whose teen sister was in a car with Hernandez when the shooting took place, told the Denver Post this week that she heard the gunshots and ran to the scene with her mother.
“My mom told me to start filming, but when I took out my phone, the cop was like, ‘Don’t you dare!'” Diaz told the Post.
Diaz also said a cop grabbed her mother and tried to calm her down, according to the paper.
A neighbor recorded the scene from across the street, showing police handcuffing Hernandez and placing her next to the street, according to footage obtained by KUSA and broadcast on Tuesday.
“He’s dead,” a voice can be heard saying on the video, apparently referring to Hernandez. Another witness told the station she thought the police mistook Hernandez for a boy because of her short hair.
KUSA also reported that an eyewitness contradicted the police account of the shooting.
The witness, one of the other teenagers in the car, said the officers shot Hernandez through the driver’s side window, causing the teenager to lose control of the car and hit one of the cops in the leg.
Denver Police Chief Robert White had said on Monday that Hernandez drove into one of the officers first, which then prompted the cops to open fire into the car.
Hernandez’s mother has demanded a second, independent investigation into the death of her daughter, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
h/t PINAC
Of COURSE the cops are lying. They are getting really good at that.
It’s sad but it isn’t going to matter. You have a Cop with a broken leg, probably the result of events after the shooting, but a Cop with an injury no less. The police are going to walk. All you can hope for is that there is enough humanity in the Cop that shot this kid that he suffers for what he’s done. He can walk away from prosecution and he will. But he cannot walk away from the truth as he knows it to be. He will have to live with it.
There is no “of course” to it. My gut feeling is they are but there is no certainly in that. I doubt we’ll get much done if we are as adamant as the Cops. Cops are to protect us which on rare occasion may require killing. We’d like those killings to be by a Cop protecting a member of the public but they almost never are. Cop’s are killing, often under very questionable circumstances, because they, themselves, “felt” threatened. But we need to keep a level head if we are to deal effectively with this. You are playing a game with an opponent that’s stacked the deck, crammed 10 aces up his sleeve and everyone in the room supports him. Knee jerk condemnation works for them.
It will be very interesting to see how the cops make their story match up with the ballistics report.