Tasha Thomas was not told until 90-minutes into an interrogation that her boyfriend, John Crawford III, had died after police officers shot him in an Ohio Walmart. Crawford had an air-pump bb gun in his hands that he'd taken from the shelf of the store. He was talking on the phone. The toy rifle was pointed at the floor when officers turned the corner and opened fire.
Before Thomas was informed that her boyfriend was dead, she was already in tears, and the detective suggested that she was behaving as if she were on drugs, while he repeatedly insinuated that Crawford brought a loaded weapon into Walmart.
Crawford did not have a firearm on him at the Beavercreek Walmart. He only entered with a cell phone, a plastic bag, and a mental list of crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate bars to make s'mores at home.
Detective Rodney Curd said that he was not informed that Crawford did not have a weapon until after this interrogation. In a video obtained by The Guardian, Curd threatens Thomas with jail, and while Thomas willfully offers to take a lie detector test, Curd says, "I don't know" is always the response of a liar.
Officers were responding to a 911 call reporting that a black male was wandering the aisles of Walmart with a weapon, pointing it at children. Officers said Crawford made an aggressive move when they arrived. Surveillance footage from the store proved both of those accusations wrong, Crawford never pointed the pump-rifle at anyone, and he turned to run when the cops ambushed him, shooting him in the stomach. Crawford's attorneys have noted that under both Ohio's open-carry firearms laws and Walmart policy, Crawford could have legally been walking around with a real rifle in his hands.
At several points during the interview Thomas swore to God, and on the lives of her three children, and the grave of her brother that she was telling the truth: that Crawford did not take a gun into the store.
While Thomas wept, Curd asked, “Have you been drinking? Drugs? Your eyes are kind of messed-up looking”.
Two days later, Curd would tell the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which had taken over the investigation that he, "became aggressive during the interview with Thomas because of his (Curd) disbelief that if Mr Crawford brought a gun inside Walmart, Ms Thomas didn’t see the gun." To which, Curd says in the video, "everyone knows" when he's carrying a gun. Curd told the investigators that he'd not been informed that Crawford was unarmed.
In September, a grand jury decided that the two officer involved should not face criminal charges due to the threatening nature of the 911 call they were responding to.
[via The Guardian]
