Caught on tape: Police beat and taser 'gentle' mentally-ill homeless man to death

[Ulysses31]

Doesn't look good but I'll wait for further information from the police before commenting although I can't imagine any crime this homeless man could have done that would warrant such a beating. RIP Kelly Thomas

Caught on tape: Police beat and taser 'gentle' mentally-ill homeless man to death


A shocking video has been released allegedly showing police officers tasering and beating a homeless man to death who they claim was resisting arrest.

Though the video is not clear, eye witnesses say the homeless man - Kelly Thomas, 37 - was unable to put up any resistance and was lying on the ground on his front when the attack took place on July 5.

His screams and cries for his father can be heard amid the tasering noises.

Dead: Mentally ill homeless man Kelly Thomas, 37, was beaten and tasered to death by police for allegedly 'resisting arrest'

Shocking: This picture shows the extent of the injuries Thomas received after being beaten up by six police officers


The video was shot by a student in Fullerton, California. Kelly Thomas was beaten so badly he died in hospital several days later.

According to Gawker, Thomas - who suffered from schizophrenia - caught the attention of the police after someone reported that a burglar was breaking into cars parked near a Fullerton bus station.

When officers approached Thomas in the depot parking lot and tried to arrest him, he resisted.

After that reports diverge.

Police will not issue a statement saying the issue is under investigation but they did say that six officers were involved and two 'suffered broken bones in the fight'.

However, they recently retracted that statement saying that it was only 'soft tissue damage'.

Father: Ron Thomas has been passing out flyers seeking answers near the scene where the run-in with police left his son brain-damaged


Eye witnesses at the scene claim the six officers tasered him five times and beat him beyond recognition, which the disturbing photo of him in hospital shows.

Mark Turgeon, who was there, said: 'They kept beating him and tasering him. I could hear zapping, and he wasn't even moving.

'He had one arm in front of him like this, he wasn't resisting. And they kept telling him, "He's resisting, quit resisting", and he wasn't resisting.'

Many members of the Fullerton community described Thomas as a passive, peaceful person.

On the website Fullerton Stories, several people have shared their experiences interacting with Thomas, describing him as 'very quiet and polite', 'gentle and childlike', 'sweet', and 'never a threat'.

Thomas has a previous conviction for assault with a deadly weapon 16 years ago, according to Gawker, which has been attributed to the onset of his illness.

Since his death, his family and members of the community have held protests outside the police department headquarters, looking for answers.

Two officers were suspended shortly after the attack but police will not confirm if it was related to the 37-year-old's death.

Speaking about his son's death, Thomas's dad, Ron Thomas, a former sheriff's deputy, said: 'His death was gang-involved, the way I see it. A gang of rogue officers who brutally beat my son to death.'

He said he now feels ashamed for having ever been a law enforcement officer.

He has been in the area his son was attacked handing out flyers and asking people for help.

He said: 'The only thing we have left of our son is the blood in the gutter, that's all we have left.'

Local city council member Bruce Whitaker has called for a 'clear, factual and complete explanation of events which led to the death of Kelly J. Thomas.'

He also wants the D.A. to release a police video that apparently shows the actual beating taking place.

Fullerton police Sgt Andrew Goodrich said that Thomas began to fight officers as they tried to search him.

He said: 'We don't know why he was so combative and resistant to the officers, but it took upwards of five to six officers to subdue him.

'Sometimes when we take people into custody who don't want to go into custody, we have to use force. It is never the preferred way of doing things.'

He said police are conducting an internal investigation into the officers' actions and the District Attorney's Office is conducting a criminal investigation.

The DA's office said they cannot comment on details of cases until they are completed.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-man-Kelly-Thomas-37-death.html#ixzz1TOq49p7k

 

[Roald]

I dont see a beating in that video?!

Pic looks bad though

 

[Ulysses31]

I dont see a beating in that video?!

Pic looks bad though

The people on the video can see the beating and how many times he is tasered and you can hear them discussing it, yes the article title is a bit confusing

 

[ragincaucasian]

Quit resisting!!!!!

 

[Ravenholm]

This is what happens when you give maggot dicked bastards a badge and a uniform. They become fascists who believe they are the law. When in fact they only work for the law. Reality becomes distorted to the point of no return. They think of themselves as untouchable as their fellow policemen will side with them. Keep it in the family. Thousands of more incidents and murder get washed under the bridge through it being covered up by them sticking together. I hope these fuckers get what is coming to them, because sometimes, just sometimes, the fascists do get what is coming to them.

To quote Udo Dirkschneider from his song "Pleasure in a Dark Room" - "Fuck the bloody law!"

 

[grower_boy]

That's sick. Just look at the guy's face after they beat him.

 

[smoknn]

im not even going to look...2 words has put the final touch on how i feel about our justice system : not guilty!...=:thefinger i got my own set of rules now

 

[Ulysses31]

Now on Wikipedia but has apparently received little media coverage in the US and some US papers have started publishing the story AFTER it ran in the British paper that I posted. Seeing as the guy was mentally ill his father (an ex cop) said if he had stopped taking his meds he would not have understood any of the officers commands and I would have thought police officers would have been trained to recognise the mental state of people they approach, let's hope the report is thorough and transparent, heard 5 of the 6 officers are back on duty!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Thomas_(beating_victim)

http://gawker.com/5826207/fbi-investigating-cops-fatal-beating-of-mentally-ill-man

 

[smoknn]

taser taser taser..boy thats a quick way to do your job with minimum effort.. as of late...if they wanna use that taser ..why dont he take it and go where that idiot is in jail that wont tell where a child is..he was the last one seen with..first thing i thought about when i seen this..i bet about 3 hits with a taser his memory would come back like magic...stick a fork in our law its done!!! ahhhh before some smart ass What child???..ITS BEEN ALL OVER THE NEWS...if you dont know...your ass better call somebodyyyyyyyyy

 

[D-rock]

I bet the chances the officers are either cleared or get off with slaps on the wrist compared to what they did is pretty good, just like it is with most cases like this. What's stunning is half the time blatant evidence isn't even enough for anything to be done anymore.

 

[Alyssa Rose]

This makes me so sad
First of all if there are eyewitnesses who are saying that he wasn't resisting then he probably wasn't resisting.. I mean why would random strangers lie about that?

Second of all, even if he WAS resisting arrest there's still no need for SIX freaking cops to attack him. Unless the guy was like the size of The Rock or something..
2 MAYBE 3 cops would have been just fine to subdue him to the ground. ESPECIALLY if he didn't have any weapons on him! (Which I'm assuming he didn't because I'm almost 100% sure that the media would have included that in the article some where.)

Poor Man

 

[Jon S.]

1st off, no the police are not trained to recognize the mental state of those they come in contact with.....I mean really, why should they be? That's not their area of expertise & it would be too complicated to try to train someone to recognize every possible mental illness they could come into contact with on top of all of the other duties they have to carry out. 2nd, tasers have made police officers too apt to use force, when in the past they would not have, because it's viewed as "non-lethal". In short, it's made them "soft"....though in this case, it looks like they went medieval on him with their batons. 3rd, and most importantly, this is a sad commentary on the state of the mental health system in the United States today. In the old days, before Reagan fucked the system all to Hell, someone like him would have been in an mental hospital getting the treatment he needed. Today, the mentally ill too often end up on the streets and in the modern replacement for the mental hospitals of yesteryear......our prisons!!!! Of course while in prison, they do not get the treatment that they need either and they are released back into the same fucked up, supportless setting they were in to begin with. Bottom line, our mental health system is severely broken & that is something that needs to be fixed.....sadly I don't see that happening. Instead, the chronically mentally ill are doomed to a life of being warehoused in prisons....when they aren't wasting away on our streets. That's the REALLY sad part of it!

On a related note, I find it heart warming that the father is soooooooo concerned about his son AFTER he was killed! Where the fuck was he when his son was living on the streets? Just sayin'!!!!!!!!!

 

[Ulysses31]

New CCTV footage shows witnesses describing the incident, hopefully they come forward and give evidence at any trial. The incident now sounds even worse if that was even possible



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/02/kelly-thomas-fullerton-ho_n_916306.html

1st off, no the police are not trained to recognize the mental state of those they come in contact with.....I mean really, why should they be? That's not their area of expertise & it would be too complicated to try to train someone to recognize every possible mental illness they could come into contact with on top of all of the other duties they have to carry out.

A cop should be able to identify why a person is being incoherent or unresponsive, whether they are being deceitful/evasive on purpose, whether they are drunk or on drugs or if they have learning difficulties. They should then use this diagnosis to decide how they will approach the individual, a doctor does the same when dealing with patients. They don't exactly need to be fully qualified psychiatrists but should how a reasonable level of training on the matter which will only help smoothen relations with the public and avoid incidents like this.

 

[Jon S.]

A cop should be able to identify why a person is being incoherent or unresponsive, whether they are being deceitful/evasive on purpose, whether they are drunk or on drugs or if they have learning difficulties. They should then use this diagnosis to decide how they will approach the individual, a doctor does the same when dealing with patients. They don't exactly need to be fully qualified psychiatrists but should how a reasonable level of training on the matter which will only help smoothen relations with the public and avoid incidents like this.

In an ideal world yes, it's just not practical given what you're dealing with. Most policemen have at most 2 years college and/or military experience (and older policemen would not likely have that much). As such, given that so many behaviors and/or symptoms can point to SEVERAL different things, a person that could never have the education needed (let's face it, even those with the education misdiagnose things all the time), won't likely be able to be trained sufficiently for it to make much difference IMHO. I mean, you could briefly train a plumber to do open heart surgery.....but how good of a job would he do, & would you really want him doing it? Just sayin'! Besides, the mental state of the victim wasn't even the whole cause of the problem....it was the mob mentality that the policemen in question were swept up in, and that is something that had to have been brewing within the department for sometime (a lack of discipline).

However, the state of our mental health system in this country is the real problem in this case. A man like that should have never been forced to be living on the streets and not getting the medical attention that he so clearly needed (not to mention the fact that we can't even force the mentally ill to get the treatment if they don't want it...which is another debate all together). That fact is something that I fear will go unnoticed and unaddressed in the whole sad affair. That is another unfortunate thing as well.

 

[L3ggy]

I can't believe what I've been reading.

 

[meesterperfect]

Lets just hope that the police arent found not guilty.
the mentally handicapped may riot for three days, burning the city, mass looting, and attacking and killing all the non mentally handicapped people they see.

 

[meesterperfect]

once they put cuffs on the guy thats it, no more resiting even if he was.
usually 1 or 2 cops could do that.
or even one shock, maybe 2 and there should be no problem getting those cuffs on especially with 6 cops.
No, it seems like this was murder, nothing less.

people are now afraid of their government, afraid of the cops.
I even go to my mailbox each day with anxiety.
I gotta get the fuck out of here again, asap.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSzAHM97LJQ

 

[meesterperfect]

A while back while waiting at a red light I saw a car with a cop right on his ass fly by right in front of me going about 80-90 mph.
5 seconds later boom, head on with a young girl, killed her.

I went to the scene which was about 300 feet away, saw her dead in the car.
Dead 20 year old just because a guy evaded the police, like they couldnt just arrest him later. Stupid cops.
I wound up in court as a witness for the trial of the driver.
The prosecuter had told me not say anything about how close the cop was to the car.
He actually told me that, to lie in court.
When a lawyer in court asked me how close was the cop I said, "he was stuck to his bumper like glue".
After that the local cops were on me so bad I eventually had to move to another town.
I havent trusted the police since.

 

[Boothbabe]

I wonder when the people of the US will finally do something about things like this. This is murder, pure and simple. Just because the cops kill someone doesn't mean it isn't murder. What's even worse is that your government is turning a blind eye wich means it's basically condoning it.

 

[DJCowboy]

The part where he screams for his dad is actually kind of sad