As long as there are police officers like corporal Christopher Carter of the University of the Incarnate Word campus police, there will be cause for alarm that freedom and justice in the United States have seriously eroded.
The San Antonio campus cop was placed on paid administrative leave following the shooting of a clearly unarmed and non-combative student. What was the 23-year-old student’s crime? Robert Cameron Redus was shot dead by officer Carter at 2 a.m. for nothing more than making a sarcastic remark toward the officer who pulled him over for speeding..
According to the police report, local KSAT News explains that witnesses affirmed that the cop literally “emptied his gun” into the student without warning.
“I didn’t hear him say anything like, ‘Get down on your hands and knees,’ you know?” one witness explained, “I didn’t hear him say anything. He just started shooting. He emptied the gun on him… Boom, boom, boom.Six shots — five or six.”
Mohammad Haidarasl also witnessed the murder, saying that Redus’ last words were “Oh, you’re gonna shoot me?”
Redus couldn’t believe officer Carter would actually go that far, but Haidarasl added that the cop kept yelling “Stop resisting, stop resisting,” even though it was clear Redus was offering no physical residence, only sarcastic comments.
I think about all the sarcastic comments I made when I was 23, and I’m appalled that someone who has been entrusted with the responsibility of protecting the public from genuinely dangerous people would fire his gun into someone who posed no physical threat.
According to witnesses, officer Christopher Carter shot five bullets into a 23 year-old student who posed no physical threat. Officer Christopher Carter shot five bullets into a 23 year-old student who made sarcastic comments.
This isn’t correct. Cameron Redus was not shot for making sarcastic comments. He was pulled over on suspicion of driving drunk (and no one disputes that he’d been out drinking earlier in the evening), had a several-minute confrontation with the officer where he repeatedly refused to comply with the officer’s requests, allegedly took the officer’s baton from him and then hit the officer with it, and the officer only pulled the gun on him AFTER all of that. There are witnesses who confirm that Redus was being belligerent, as well as a recording from Carter’s body mic.
From the Daily Mail:
During the six-minute confrontation, recorded on a body microphone the policeman was wearing, Carter asked Redus to stop and put his hands on the truck. He told him 14 times to put his hands behind is back and told him three times he was under arrest. He told the student 56 times to stop resisting.
At one point, the much smaller student managed to get Carter’s baton, pin him against a wall and hit him multiple times on the head and arm with the baton, Police Chief Richard Pruitt.
'There was a lot of communication,' he said.
Carter managed to get the baton back, and the struggle continued until Redus broke free, according to police.
Carter then drew his .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and warned Redus four times to stop or he would shoot, Pruitt said. Then, Carter told police, Redus charged him with his arm raised as if to hit him.
Carter fired his gun six times, hitting Redus five times at close range in the chest, neck, eye, arm and thigh.
Investigators are determining whether Redus was intoxicated at the time of the shooting.
I’m not in any way defending the officer’s decision to shoot the guy, but painting Redus as an innocent who did nothing more than spout off a single sarcastic remark is not accurate.