Thank you for the information.
Are you of the opinion that the shooting was intentional?
Found this post over on the PajamasMedia thread -
“65. barge captain
A few essential facts for the uninformed:
1. Earlier on New Years Eve, 2009, just a few hours before Oscar Grant was shot, a different group of passengers was bothering riders on the same BART line, and when confronted by officers, one of them pulled out a gun, but fled before firing it, and eventually jumped off the platform at Oakland West while fleeing and was seriously injured. So the BART cops already knew that unruly passengers on BART that night were toting guns, and so were justifiably on edge.
2. The autopsy on Oscar Grant revealed that he was totally hopped up on alcohol, cocaine and FENTANYL, a heroin substitute more powerful than dilaudid. He was totally stoned and probably out of his gourd and irrational.
3. Oscar Grant himself was arrested for brandishing a gun a few years earlier, convicted and spent jail time over it. He was a known thug, despite his canonization in the media.
4. The gang Oscar Grant was with that night was rampaging up and down the BART train terrorizing the passengers and brawling with anybody who would fight. Oscar was in the thick of it.
These mitigating facts seriously cast the incident in a different light. BART cops are not like “mall cops” as some have described them: they are in a highly dangerous situation on a daily basis and have to deal with gangs with guns, terrorism threats, and just plain thugs like Oscar Grant running rampant in the system. No wonder Mehserle was seriously stressed out, because he was acutely aware of the gun incident on the same line a short time earlier.
Before you condemn Mehserle based on emotion, put yourself in his shoes. Stress-induced accident is entirely believable. And not a single witness ever said that Mehserle ever did anything unprofessional aside from this one incident.
July 8, 2010 - 7:09 pm Link to this Comment | Reply
No, I don’t think it was intentional. I think the cop honestly intended to pull his Tazer. I don’t believe he intended to just execute the guy. I think he screwed up badly, and I think involuntary manslaughter is probably the right verdict.
Do you have a direct link for the post in 77?