68 Yr Old Former Marine Killed By Police

[Reb]

68 year old former Marine shot to death in his own home after he accidentally triggered his Medic Alert in his sleep.

‘Officers, Why Do You Have Your Guns Out?’

The niece stood in the darkened stairwell of the Winbrook Houses, listening, as 20 feet away five police officers yelled at her uncle, who had locked himself in his apartment.

It was 5:25 on a chill November morning. The officers banged loud and hard, demanding that her 68-year-old uncle open his door.

“He was begging them to leave him alone,” she recalls. “He sounded scared.” She pulls her shawl about her shoulders and her voice cracks; she is speaking for the first time about what she saw. “I heard my uncle yelling, ‘Officers, officers, why do you have your guns out?’”

The string of events that night sounds prosaic, a who-cares accumulation of little mistakes and misapprehensions. Cumulatively, though, it is like tumbling down the stairs. Somehow the uncle, Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., a former Marine who had heart problems and wheezed if he walked more than 40 feet, triggered his medical alert system pendant. The system operator came on the loudspeaker in his one-bedroom apartment, asking: “Mr. Chamberlain, are you O.K.?” All of this is recorded.

Mr. Chamberlain didn’t respond. So the operator signaled for an ambulance. Police patrol cars fell in behind — standard operating procedure in towns across America. Except an hour later, even as Mr. Chamberlain insisted he was in good health, the police had snapped the locks on the apartment door.

They fired electric charges from Tasers, and beanbags from shotguns. Then they said they saw Mr. Chamberlain grab a knife, and an officer fired his handgun.

Boom! Boom! Mr. Chamberlain’s niece Tonyia Greenhill, who lives upstairs, recalls the echoes ricocheting about the hall. She pushed out a back door and ran into the darkness beneath overarching oaks. He lay on the floor near his kitchen, two bullet holes in his chest, blood pooling thick, dying.

It makes sense to be humble in the presence of conflicting accounts. The White Plains public safety commissioner declared this a “warranted use of deadly force”; the shooter was later put on modified assignment. Mr. Chamberlain, in the commissioner’s telling, had withstood electric charges, grabbed a butcher knife and charged the officers.

The alert system phone in Mr. Chamberlain’s apartment recorded most of the standoff, as did a security camera in the hall. And the officers’ Tasers carried video recorders.

Last month, the Westchester County district attorney played these for the dead man’s son, Kenneth Chamberlain Jr., who teaches martial arts for a local nonprofit organization and intends to file a lawsuit. He is lithe, with a shaved head, and takes pride in a reasoned manner. “My family, we’re not into histrionics,” he says. “We don’t run down the street inciting riot.”

His voice cracks, though, as he describes the tapes. “I heard fear,” he says. “In my 45 years on this earth, I never heard my father sound like that.”

The district attorney will present the case to a grand jury and has not released transcripts. But the family’s recollection matches that of neighbors who listened through closed doors.

They say officers taunted Mr. Chamberlain. He shouted: “Semper fi,” the Marine Corps motto. The police answered with loud shouts of “Hoo-rah!” Another officer, the niece says, said he wanted to pee in Mr. Chamberlain’s bathroom.

Someone, the niece and neighbors say, yelled a racial epithet at the door. Black and white officers were present.

Kenny Randolph listened from his apartment across the hall. “They put fear in his heart,” he says. “It wasn’t a crime scene until they made it one.”

The police say Mr. Chamberlain was “known” to them, although it appears he had not been convicted of a crime. There are intimations that he wrestled with emotional issues. Sometimes, neighbors say, he talked to himself. Who’s to say? As often, life’s default position is set to “complicated.”

Many police departments have trained corps of officers expert in talking with the emotionally upset. Their rule of thumb: talk quietly and de-escalate. That night in White Plains, no one appeared to have de-escalated anything.

Mr. Chamberlain sounded spooked. His son recalls hearing his father say on tape: “This is my sworn testimony. White Plains officers are coming in here to kill me.” A few minutes later, a bullet tore through his rib and heart. The ambulance took him to White Plains Hospital, where he soon died.

His son lives five minutes away. He says he could have talked his father down. Standing in the office of his lawyer Randolph M. McLaughlin, he mimes knocking on his dad’s door. “Dad, it’s me, Ken, I’m here.” His eyes are bloodshot and brimming. “I always said, ‘I’m the protector now.’ But I wasn’t there when he needed me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/ny...ions.html?_r=1

[RT]

I never would have done it that way in a million years, but I failed the psych eval to become a cop. Oh well, we know what the sides are at this point. Nobody in charge wants someone who is going to be making their own moral judgements and then committing themselves to those judgements. They just want machines who will act out policies and orders, with rule by terror.

My personal and apparently unqualified opinion is that if someone is not willing to accept some level of risk to do the job and de-escalate situations, they don't have any business doing it while wearing a badge under fairly high levels of legal protection. This whole "James Bond license to kill" thing for every single street level cop has got to end, or well, some cops got to end, either way is fine by me.

Sure, the old guy maybe "lost it" but come on, it does not take a whole major lot of special training to at least try to talk someone down then tackle them or pull a martial arts move. I have been held to a higher standard than that in the past and told my character was lacking, to the point that the only safe place for society was for me to spend my life in an isolation cell.

Now I see what breed of "society" the government was looking to protect and give free reign.

[jefferson101]

The Cops all went home safely that night, and that's absolutely all that matters.

Just ask them.

[krinkov]

I never talk like this anymore. but F....................everyone of those Cop's....and on the last day their flesh rot off their entire body................right before their freaking eyeball's burst from the sockets in their skull's.

I am sick and tired of the 10% of L.E.maybe more now who think they are above any law.

But GOD did say he has a place for them also.and its not fires in Hell... it's your worst life moment played over and over and over again.

with whatever you loved on earth burning right next to you over and over....and not being able to get the stench out of your system. FOR ETERNITY!!

Krinkv

p.s. that was my vent for the month..

[kARL]

I could see them knocking on the door to see if the old Marine was ok, but why tasers and beanbags?
Why shoot ? If you are that much of a damn pussy that you, a whole squad of you, cannot take a kitchen knife from a old sick man than ..that dept needs to be replaced and Holder dam sure should pay them a visit....sometimes I think that Al and the Rev are right.

karl

[Noland]

Originally Posted by krinkov

p.s. that was my vent for the month..

Hang in there. The new month starts in two days and two hours.

[9th Company]

Second story on this blog post:
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com...overnment.html

The original story was that Chamberlain “came at the officers” with a butcher knife and – I’m not kidding – a hatchet. His son points out that his father’s heart was so weak that he couldn’t walk more than forty feet without resting. The initial account is difficult to reconcile with the footage captured by the Taser and security cameras. Furthermore, even if the old man had lunged at the cops, they had the duty to retreat: They had no legal or moral right to be in the home, and Chamberlain had the legal and moral right to evict them by force.

Long after the incident, the police rationalized that the invasion was necessary because they weren’t sure whether “anybody else inside was in danger.” This is a matter that could have been cleared up through use of an obscure piece of technology called a telephone, a remarkable instrument that could have been used to contact either Mr. Chamberlain or his son, who didn’t live far away. But this would have deprived the armored adolescents on the police force of an opportunity to bust down a door and impose themselves on someone who couldn’t fight back.

[Reb]

I bet none of the cops will even get reprimanded, much less charged with a crime.

[OldFalGuy]

I bet Reb is right.
Is it possible the cops were black and the Marine white???
Will there be a march..................not hardly

[Wood Devil]

Originally Posted by kARL

I could see them knocking on the door to see if the old Marine was ok, but why tasers and beanbags?
Why shoot ? If you are that much of a damn pussy that you, a whole squad of you, cannot take a kitchen knife from a old sick man than ..that dept needs to be replaced and Holder dam sure should pay them a visit....sometimes I think that Al and the Rev are right.

karl

They might have thought there was an intruder in the house. But a lot of cops these days seem very on edge, and don't deal well with high-stress situations -- I remember a couple years back having to run outside to help get two of my neighbors' dogs back in their yard (there were five cruisers on scene, driving over lawn trying to corral the two dogs, and in some instances running around, tripping over one another like giggling kids, guns drawn.

I have no doubt they would have shot the dogs.

They seem very quick to kill.

[kARL]

It is not P.C. but the depts need to go back to the old hiring rules.
BIG, rough ...men who have been in a fight or two and know how it is done.


Some police people I have seen are the Hippy's size..the only way they could stop something is by shooting .

karl