On Feb. 19, Baltimore law enforcement officials shot and killed 18-year-old Donnell Rochester. {The teenager} was fleeing a site visitors cease associated to a search warrant for his failure to seem in court docket for a carjacking cost. Officers pumped bullets into the automotive as Rochester drove away after which handcuffed him after he was mortally wounded.
Maryland’s legal professional basic’s workplace recognized two officers concerned within the capturing as Connor Murray and Robert Mauri. Each are on administrative depart pending additional investigation.
Physique digital camera footage exhibits officers working at Rochester with their weapons drawn whereas the teenager remains to be within the car. When the automotive slowly strikes ahead, officers hearth a number of pictures at it.
Rochester was unarmed. The police division launched body camera footage in March that doesn’t present the automotive placing any officers as Rochester drives away, although Murray, who was close to the automotive, does fall down as he’s working and firing his weapon.
Murray himself later says within the footage that Rochester didn’t strike him with the automotive. “You OK?” an officer asks him on the scene. Murray replies, “Yeah.”
The opposite officer asks Murray if he bought hit.
“No, I don’t suppose it hit me,” Murray solutions.
However that’s not what officers wrote in a Feb. 22 request for a search and seizure warrant for Rochester’s automotive, during which they cited first-degree tried homicide — claiming the teenager struck a police officer along with his automotive — as a cause to go looking the car.
Avisionews obtained the warrant this week. It states that Rochester “struck” Murray along with his car and that Murray fired “a number of rounds” as a result of Rochester didn’t cease.
Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Solar/Tribune Information Service through Getty Photos
Officers’ shifting descriptions of what occurred throughout Rochester’s killing are prone to gas neighborhood anger and mistrust. The teenager’s household has been organizing protests for months. Raquel Coombs, a spokesperson for the legal professional basic’s workplace, which is investigating the capturing, didn’t reply to Avisionews’s questions, citing the pending investigation.
Baltimore police additionally didn’t remark to Avisionews on the search and seizure warrant.
Rochester’s relations have known as for the officers concerned within the capturing to be criminally charged and have questioned their techniques once they shot {the teenager} and pulled him out of the car.
Attorneys representing Rochester’s household advised Avisionews the discrepancy between the physique digital camera footage and subsequent police accounts exhibits police are greedy for a proof for why they shot an unarmed teenager.
No weapon was ever recovered from the car Rochester was driving. Baltimore police solely discovered bullet fragments from the capturing, projectiles, and plastic tubes of “suspected” marijuana, the seizure warrant says.
“It seems to be just like the police have been searching for any means to cowl or mitigate what had occurred,” Malcolm Ruff, one of many household’s attorneys, advised Avisionews. “He was a scared 18 yr previous child who was making an attempt to get away and get out of a nasty scenario. He bought scared, he tried to get away, he didn’t attempt to run that police officer over.”
Danielle Brown, Rochester’s mom, has organized rallies for months since her son’s demise. She mentioned the deadly capturing was “unjustifiable” and that her son was by no means a “risk to the police” once they approached him in broad daylight.
Rochester was a scholar at Anne Arundel County public colleges and his household lives exterior of Baltimore metropolis, she advised Avisionews.
“He had his complete life forward of him that he wished to pursue, his targets and goals,” Brown advised Avisionews.
“We simply need solutions, and [to] let the world know that Donnell ought to nonetheless be right here. We’re going to be his voice since he can’t. My son didn’t deserve what occurred to him, for his life to be taken away.”
Baltimore Metropolis Police Division
In 2019, a chief decide slammed the detective who filed the search and seizure warrant, Tavon McCoy, for intimidating witnesses throughout a homicide case; the decide in contrast McCoy’s techniques to the “Eliot Ness” period of interrogation through the Nineteen Thirties.
Ruff, who represents Rochester’s household, additionally contends the officers on the scene violated the division’s coverage of capturing into transferring autos — a observe that many departments have banned or discouraged as a result of it could endanger bystanders and has not been an efficient approach to detain folks whereas executing warrants or site visitors stops. Officers are additionally not purported to step in entrance of transferring autos to scale back hurt.
“That is an unreasonable capturing, that is an unconstitutional capturing in our eyes,” Ruff mentioned. “If officers correctly skilled adopted the insurance policies that have been put in place for them, then Donnell would nonetheless be alive right now.”
William Murphy, additionally representing the household within the case, says Rochester was afraid for his life as a younger teen who grew up within the “period of Freddie Grey,” the Black man who died in Baltimore police custody in 2015.
In 2016, Time magazine did a profile of the neighborhood Grey grew up in and photographed residents locally. Rochester, then 12, was certainly one of them.
“He had each cause to be scared due to the proliferation of police violence in America and police violence in Baltimore,” Murphy mentioned. “At his age, he ought to have been scared.”
