After 17-year-old Anthony J. Thompson was shot and killed by police at his Knoxville, Tennessee high school last week, the woman who called the police has come out apologizing for making the call.
Thompson was shot Monday, April 12 in an Austin-East Magnet High School bathroom after his girlfriend Alexus Page said the two got into a physical altercation at school. Page’s mother, Regina Perkins, called the police on her daughter’s boyfriend of nine months after she said she unsuccessfully tried to reach Thompson’s mother.
Not long after Officer Jonathan Clabough visited Perkins’ home to take a report, Perkins saw a helicopter flying over the school and heard reports of a lockdown, despite Perkins saying she told authorities that the teen likely wasn’t armed.
“I am so sorry, and I never meant for anything to happen to him,” Perkins said. “We are mourning, my daughter is grieving the loss of her first love and we also want answers and justice in this case… This could have been prevented. That child should not be dead, and my condolences sincerely go out to Anthony’s family. There are many rumors, but this is the truth about what happened before KPD got there. We all want justice for Anthony. He should still be here.”
Police haven’t shared many details about what took place inside the high school. A Tennessee Bureau of Investigation release read that KPD received a “report of a student possibly armed with a gun,” the “student’s gun was fired,” law enforcement “fired twice” and that “preliminary examinations indicate the bullet that struck the KPD officer was not fired from the student’s handgun.”
Now, many— including Knoxville’s mayor and three of the four officers under investigation for the incident— are calling for body cam footage to be released, despite the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the Knoxville Police Department and the Knox County District Attorney General’s Office declining to release the footage.
