Cell phone footage taken from the backseat of Oregon standoff leader LaVoy Finicum’s truck shows the final moments before he was fatally shot by state police and the immediate aftermath of the confrontation.
The video, shot by fellow wildlife refuge occupier Shawna Cox and published online by the Oregonian earlier this week, was instrumental to local authorities’ investigation into what happened on a desolate stretch of Oregon highway after authorities stopped the car carrying Finicum and several other occupiers on their way to a community meeting in the town of John Day.
Aerial surveillance of the shooting released by the FBI days after Finicum’s death did not have sound.
Cox’s jarring video starts just after their truck has been pulled over. Finicum can be heard yelling at the officers from his car window, telling them, “Go ahead, put your bullet through me.” As sirens flash through the back window, Finicum repeatedly tells officers he plans to continue on to John Day.
The occupiers in the car then decide to drive away from police, ducking down below the seats as Finicum speeds down the road. A chase ensues until the truck encounters a roadblock. After shots are fired toward the vehicle to make Finicum stop, he swerves into a snowbank. Finicum then leaps out of the driver’s seat, yelling, “Go ahead, shoot me.”
More shots ring out, and Cox and the other occupiers in the truck call out as they realize that Finicum’s been shot.
The Oregon State Police announced last week that the fatal shooting was justified, although their announcement that two additional shots were allegedly concealed by one or more FBI agents have raised new questions about the confrontation and led the Department of Justice’s inspector general to open an investigation into those agents.
Finicum was the only individual to lose his life in the month-long occupation by anti-government activists at Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge.
Watch the video via The Oregonian:
Any way you look at it he got what he asked for, the ignorant bastard.
Some say any loss of human life is a tragedy.
Some don’t.
Same video as shown at press conference, yes?
mark me down in the don’t column when it comes to the militia shits (perhaps a natural reaction from an Okie that remembers 1995)
So this is “new video” we here in the TPM comments section posted over a week ago.
Josh and crew should really consider stooping to the level of us hoi polloi. They may be a little better informed and up-to-date if they did.