March 10, 2015
The Georgia Bureauu of Investigation has been brought in to investigate the fatal police shooting of an Dekalb County man with a history of mental illness who was both unarmed and naked at the time of the shooting.
Twenty-seven-year-old Anthony Hill was an Air Force veteran in the Iraq War and an extremely talented musician. Around 1 p.m, police arrived at the scene after reports that a man wearing no clothes was crawling on the ground and banging on doors.
"He was doing weird movement. He was crawling on the floor, lying down on the floor," one witness told the local news.
An officer reportedly told Mr. Hill to go inside or he would be arrested. Later, Mr. Hill lunge at the officer, which is when he was shot twice and killed.
"He ran to the police. He runs wide open with the hands up," said one witness.
The officer who shot and killed Mr. Hill is a white male, leading to concerns of racial bias.
In a news conference on Monday, Cedric L. Alexander, the DeKalb County deputy chief operating officer for public safety, said the officer had had a Taser at the time. He said he did not know whether the officer had used it.
Pedro Castillo, 43, is a maintenance man at the Heights at Chamblee, the apartment complex northeast of Atlanta where Mr. Hill was shot. Mr. Castillo said that while it seemed to him that the officer did not have to shoot Mr. Hill, the officer "did have to defend himself" because Mr. Hill did not stop when ordered to do so.
The incident is the third fatal police shooting of an unarmed or apparently unarmed black man in the last five days, following shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Madison, Wis. — and as the nation continues to debate matters of race, policing, and lethal force in the wake of the fatal shooting of another unarmed black man, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August.
By Tuesday morning, the news had already spurred a rash of outraged comments on Twitter, and grief and anger here at the Heights, a complex of dun-colored apartments rented mostly by working-class Latino families. A number of mothers here, who would not give their names because they are undocumented immigrants, said Mr. Hill had been a friendly and well-known presence in the complex who often played soccer with their children and picked up trash in a nearby play area.
However, a number of people here said Mr. Hill seemed troubled on Tuesday. Some of them assumed he might be high on drugs, or mentally ill and lacking a stabilizing medication.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Harrietta Jones, 62, the cousin of Mr. Hill’s mother, said that Mr. Hill had been a veteran of the Air Force who had been treated by the Veteran’s Administration. "To my understanding he was having some difficulties with the medication that he was on," said Ms. Jones, who lives in Moncks Corner, S.C.
In a news conference on Monday, Cedric L. Alexander, the DeKalb County deputy chief operating officer for public safety, said the officer had had a Taser at the time. He said he did not know whether the officer had used it.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is examining the shooting, and the officer was placed on administrative leave pending the results of the investigation.
Julio Hernandez, 54, a groundskeeper at the complex, said Mr. Hill, who went by "Tony," used to skateboard around the complex with Mr. Hernandez’s 14 year-old son. He said he had never seen Mr. Hill act aggressive or appear to be intoxicated.
"He was a calm, friendly person," Mr. Hernandez said. "To me, this was police abuse, because what can a naked person do?"
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Tuesday, March 10th 2015 at 4:32PM
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