Police shootings heap pain on families

Kenny Strother, 20, was shot and killed by a New Orleans police officer Jan. 31 after leaving an Uptown veterinary clinic he had broken into to steal drugs. Police officials said Strother tried to take the officer's gun and that the rookie officer responded as he was trained to.

But Strother was unarmed and, according to friends and family, not violent. They find it hard to believe he would have lunged for a police officer's gun. More likely, they said, he was scared and trying to push past the officer to escape.

As with many police shootings, the debate over what happened that early morning in a narrow alley on Maple Street has become a point of contention between police and the victim's family.

The Police Department has reached a preliminary conclusion that officer Robert Macklin's actions were justified, but a complete report on the incident will be sent to the Orleans Parish district attorney's office, which will let a grand jury decide whether there was any criminal wrongdoing.

Kim Strother said she thinks police made a mistake. When she said goodbye to her son during a memorial service Sunday, she mourned not only the loss of her youngest child, but also the senseless way he died.

"Kenny's death is just so unnecessary," she said. "And the fact that no one is being held accountable for killing my son is just very painful."

Nationwide, police officers shoot and kill about 400 people each year, according to the Department of Justice.

In 2001, New Orleans officers used deadly force, the intentional firing of a weapon to protect an officer's life or that of a civilian, 37 times.

Erik Daniels, 18, who was fatally shot June 3 in Algiers. Police said Daniels jumped from a balcony in an attempt to escape from police and bail bondsmen serving an arrest warrant. Ordered to stop, Daniels reached under his shirt, police said, and officers thought he was reaching for a weapon. A bullet pierced his left arm and hit his heart.

Daniels' relatives claim authorities beat Daniels and threw his body off the balcony.

A 40-year-old man, shot twice in the chest at close range when, police said, he tried to attack an officer with a screwdriver Sept. 30 in Mid-City. Police said the man struggled with police after being caught stealing copper gutters.

Joseph Rideau, 22, who was shot Oct. 28 by a member of the Police Department's SWAT Team in Algiers, ending a 12-hour standoff during which the armed-robbery suspect held an AK-47 assault rifle to a young woman's head. Police said they were unable to deal with the armed and angry Rideau, who was waving a gun loaded with a 75-round banana clip when he was killed.

The Rideau family did not contest the shooting. In an interview after Rideau was killed and her other son was jailed in connection with the same incident, Karen Rideau said: "I know my boys didn't always do right, but I raised them the best I could. I just know it shouldn't have come down to this."

Sylvester Scott, 26, who was fatally shot Dec. 13 shortly before midnight near a Gert Town nightclub. Scott died from a single gunshot wound that entered the back of his shoulder and exited through his chest. Police said Scott was shot while turning and pointing a pistol over his shoulder at an officer. A 9 mm handgun was recovered from the scene.

Scott's family and friends said police used "unreasonable force." They staged a protest, holding signs with messages such as "NOPD killed my son" and "Justice for Sylvester Scott."

After any incident in which a suspect is injured or killed by police, the NOPD follows a set of procedures that is similar to those used by other police departments: The officer who fired his or her gun is temporarily reassigned to desk duty. After an initial report is prepared by the department's cold-case homicide division, independent investigations are conducted by the department's Public Integrity Division and the city's Office of Municipal Investigation.

The information gathered is turned over to the Orleans Parish district attorney's office and presented to a grand jury.

Of the 10 police shootings in 2001, a grand jury found no wrongdoing on the part of the officers in seven cases. The three other cases are pending.

Local civil rights lawyer Mary Howell said the law may give police officers too much leeway in terms of the use of lethal force.

"Once they say they're fearful or felt in danger, any steps they take are justified," Howell said. "Anytime you see a shooting of an unarmed person, you have to ask yourself: ‘What went wrong here? Was it a failure of perception, and was that a reasonable perception or not? Was there, in fact, a struggle, and is there any evidence to say there was or wasn't?' "

On the day he died, Kenny Strother called his older brother, Tommy, about 1 a.m. He left a message, asking Tommy to call him so the two could get together that week.

A few hours later, Kenny Strother called his mother, who he thought was helping at a friend's bar that evening and would still be awake. He apologized for not having visited in a while, she recalled. Before the pair got off the phone, they made plans to talk later in the day. Kenny Strother said he was going to hang out with friends.

"I can't figure out for the life of me what happened between when I talked to him at 3:15 and when he died" less than two hours later, Kim Strother said.

According to police, three officers responded to a burglar alarm shortly before 5 a.m. at the Maple Small Animal clinic, 7608 Maple St. The officers saw a broken window and noticed that lights were being flipped on and off in the building. When they looked inside, they could see Strother searching through drawers. He was looking for ketamine, also known as "special k." The hallucinogenic drug and some syringes were later found in Strother's pockets.

The officers surrounded the building. When Strother left through a side door and ran toward the back of the building, he encountered Macklin, police said. Macklin had his weapon drawn but at his side.

Strother, police said, lunged at Macklin and tried to grab the officer's gun. In response, Macklin "took a step back, fought the attack off on the gun, pulled his gun back in close-quarter combat position near his body and fired one round" at Strother, acting Police Superintendent Duane Johnson said after the incident.

The bullet hit Strother in the shoulder and exited his back. Strother ran past the officer and tried to escape through a hole in a fence before he collapsed.

Johnson said Macklin had followed his training in "weapon retention and close-quarter survival techniques."

But Kim Strother is filled with questions: Why didn't the officers identify themselves when they saw her son through the clinic's windows? Did Macklin's lack of street experience play a part in her son's death?

She said one officer summed up the incident to her this way: "It was just two scared kids who made a mistake."

Deputy Chief Marlon Defillo said the Police Department does everything it can to prepare recruits and officers for the life-and-death situations they face on the street, providing more hours of lethal-force training than recommended by most police organizations. The training, he said, is ongoing and involves putting officers in realistic situations as well as classroom work.

"We would hope that if an officer is involved in a similar situation, he or she would resort back to their training and use their good judgment," Defillo said.

In an average year, Defillo said, New Orleans officers arrest "tens of thousands of people, probably in excess of 50,000." Officers are justified in using force, he said, any time they feel their life is in imminent danger. In 2001, six police officers were injured in the line of duty: Two were shot, one was stabbed and three were hit by vehicles.

"The aggressor doesn't have to have a gun," Defillo said. "The aggressor could have another weapon, be it a vehicle, a knife, a screwdriver, some lethal chemical."

Rafael Goyeneche, executive director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, said an incident last year in which officer Juan Barnes was shot is still fresh in the minds of many local officers and may unconsciously make some officers more fearful.

Barnes, 39, was one of a team of officers in the Fischer public housing complex in Algiers on March 28 when he encountered John Dorsey, 23, fresh from a crack deal. Dorsey shot Barnes in the chest and leg before taking aim at the officer's head as he lay wounded on the ground.

Barnes survived but faces a lifetime of medical care and walks with a limp. Last month, Dorsey was sentenced to 25 years in prison: 15 years for the attempted murder of Barnes and 10 years for drug violations. The decision outraged many police officers, who felt Dorsey deserved the maximum 50-year sentence for first-degree attempted murder.

"In any police department, unfortunately, we have human beings making split-second decisions about their safety and the safety of others, and sometimes, with humans, we're going to see errors. And the consequences of those errors are horrific," Goyeneche said. "Police officers are human beings being held to the standards of ‘RoboCop.' They're expected to see through poor lighting and interpret the intentions of others, and it's a very tough position to be in."

"Keep in mind that when an officer's confronted with a situation that may require the use of deadly force, we're talking about seconds for the officer to evaluate and decide if deadly force is needed," Defillo said. "The officer doesn't have the luxury of having hours to make a decision."

If only officers had more than a split second to make a decision. If only they had hours to get to know people like Kenny Strother.

Strother was the kind of child who had as many adult friends as he did mates his own age, his mother said. He was "real soulful. He just had an old soul," she said.

Strother had been a ball boy for the National Basketball Association's Detroit Pistons and was once pulled onstage by Al Green when the singer caught the child mouthing the words to his songs.

But the pivotal moment in his life, the one that laid the groundwork for the tragedy that followed, came in 1991. That's the year Kenny Strother's father, award-winning writer Shelby Strother, died after a brief and brutal battle with cancer. Kenny was 9, and he later told family members he felt cheated by the loss, angry at unknown forces, shamed he could never make his father proud.

"It affected Kenny the worst. He felt real cheated by it, that he hadn't had enough time," Kim Strother said. "All of his friends had their dads, and Kenny didn't."

Kenny Strother struggled. Frustrated by dyslexia, he didn't finish high school. In May, he overdosed on ketamine, the same drug that would be found on his body months later. He fell into a coma, and when he awakened, his mother asked why he had taken the drug.

"He just indicated he wanted to be with his father and he felt unhappy with the turn of events with his life, that he wasn't more successful," Kim Strother said. "I think he genuinely felt he had let his dad down."

But Kim Strother said her husband would have been proud of their son, with his gentle ways and great sense of humor. Kenny Strother loved to cook, and he wanted to be a chef. He'd recently told his mother he was going to get his General Educational Development diploma and apply to Delgado Community College's culinary arts program.

"He was a kid with dreams, dreams of a future," Kim Strother said. "What happened that fateful night, I don't know. I just think it should have been handled differently."

The Strother family held a memorial ceremony for Kenny Strother on Sunday. About 200 people gathered to tell stories and listen to some of Strother's favorite songs such as The Five Stairsteps' "Ooh Child." They second-lined out of the ceremony and headed downtown. There, on the banks of the Mississippi River, they scattered a handful of Strother's ashes into the water, just as they'd done for his father 11 years earlier. A stranger with a guitar strummed "Knocking on Heaven's Door" as the group stood watching the ashes blow away.

Next month, Kim Strother will travel to Florida and toss more of her son's ashes into the water off Cocoa Beach. Finally, she will go south to Key West, Fla., where she will take a boat from the island and toss the rest of her son's remains into the water where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Gulf of Mexico.

"Maybe this was Kenny's time," she said. "My only comfort is he's with his dad now."

Nationwide, police officers shoot and kill about 400 people each year, according to the Department of Justice.

Thats still not enough!

When the BATF stormtroopers knock down doors and shoot people it rarely makes a newspaper, but a common theif being killed while plying his trade deserves this long of an article???

It's unbelievable that the mom doesn't even acknowledge what her son was doing was wrong -- everything is blamed on the police. And in another one of the cases they cite, the perp was actually pointing a gun at the cop, but somehow the NOPD is responsible for their son's death?!?

Stupidity reigns.

Something in the city's media stink. TP = Times Picayune, or Toilet Paper? I'd bet the latter...

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