On Wednesday evening, a police officer fatally shot a black man during a traffic stop near Minneapolis and the victim’s girlfriend posted live footage of the bloody aftermath to Facebook, which sparked huge protests and a call by the state governor for a federal investigation.
“Police officers should not be able to gun a man down for no reason,” Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of shooting victim Philando Castile, said while speaking to reporters and sympathizers on Thursday, hours after the incident.
She said her boyfriend, Castile, was shot in front of her and her 4-year-old daughter after police pulled them over, citing a broken tail light. “Nothing within his body language said ‘Kill me, I want to be dead,'” Reynolds said.
Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton said a state probe was already under way and that he had asked the U.S. Justice Department to start an immediate, independent investigation.
“This kind of behavior is unacceptable,” Dayton added.
The use of force by police against African-Americans in cities from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore and New York has time and again sparked periodic and sometimes violent protests, as well as given birth to a movement called Black Lives Matter.
The latest shooting was especially horrifying because Reynolds streamed a 10-minute video on Facebook moments later.
The St. Anthony Police Department, meanwhile, has said only that an unidentified black man was injured during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, at 9 p.m. local time on Wednesday. He was taken to a hospital, where he later died. The police officer’s ethnicity was not clear.
“I never once in my life would have thought that my son would be killed by the persons that were supposed to protect and serve him,” Valerie Castile, mother of the victim, said on CNN.
Victim’s girlfriend said police had not even tried to check if her boyfriend was alive after they shot him five times, and it had taken at least 15 minutes for paramedics to arrive.
“Not one shot, not two, shots, not three shots, but five shots,” Reynolds said at the news conference. “They did not check for a pulse at the scene of the crime.”