'I think it's a cap gun,' the police officer said. He opened fire on an eighth-grader moments later.
Lorenzo Clerkley Jr., an eighth-grader from Oklahoma, did not know he had been shot until he started urinating on himself. He was laughing, he said, having just come to.
But his legs began to shake when he tried to walk. He looked down and saw a bullet hole in his pants.
Another police officer — not the one who shot him — was waiting for him in front of the abandoned house where he had been playing with five other friends, he said. The teenagers had been playing with replica guns, they say, and someone had called the police to report a break-in with potentially armed suspects. Now, Lorenzo had been shot twice.
The story drew a few local headlines when it occurred in March, but the city appears to have moved on. Lorenzo is back in school despite the entry and exit wounds he still has to treat every day. Sgt. Kyle Holcomb, the officer who shot him, has returned to work, having been cleared criminally, the police department said, after the district attorney decided not to file charges.
But video of the shooting from Holcomb’s body camera, which Lorenzo’s lawyer released to The Washington Post as his family prepares to file a lawsuit, may raise questions about the shooting. The footage is another grim entry in the public catalogue of police shootings — a window into an incident that unraveled in fractions of a second, and one that has prompted multiple interpretations. Lorenzo’s family said they believe the video shows the shooting was unjustified, that it was part of a pattern of misconduct at the Oklahoma City Police Department. Law enforcement officials see an officer defending himself in a moment of potential danger.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/05/07/i-think-its-cap-gun-police-officer-said-he-opened-fire-an-eighth-grader-moments-later/?utm_term=.a3c8c311bf7b&wpisrc=al_trending_now__alert-national&wpmk=1