The Minnesota cop who shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop this year after the 32-year-old man said he was legally carrying a concealed weapon was charged with second-degree manslaughter today.
St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez was also charged with two felony counts of dangerous discharge of a gun, which endangered the lives of Castile’s girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter sitting in the back seat of the car.
It was his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who live streamed the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook, providing her followers with a gruesome visual of her dying boyfriend after he had been shot four times.
“FUCK!!!” yelled the St. Anthony Police officer through the window.
“He just shot his arm off,” said Reynolds to the camera.
“I told him not to reach for it,” Yanez yelled, “I told him to get hands up!”
“You told him to get his ID,” said Reynolds, “his driver’s license. Oh my lord, I hope he’s not dead, I hope he didn’t go like that.”
Police initially said they pulled Castile over for a broken tail light on July 6, 2016, but an audio recording later proved the cop pulled him over because he had a “wide set nose,” which apparently matched the description of an armed robber.
But Castile, an elementary school worker who had a concealed weapons permit, was not a felon. He just a man who had been stopped by police 52 times for minor traffic infractions, which raised allegations that he had been racially profiled on a regular basis.
Yanez faces a maximum sentence of ten years for the manslaughter charge, according to ABC News.
Yanez is the first Minnesota cop since 2000 out of more than 150 shooting deaths to be criminally charged, according to the Star-Tribune.
Ramsey County Attorney John Choi announced the charges Wednesday in a press conference, saying that the “use of deadly force by Officer Yanez was not justified” and that “it is not enough… to express subjective fear of death or great bodily harm.”
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Minnesota v Yanez, Jeronimo (PDF)
Minnesota v Yanez, Jeronimo (Text)
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