The recent police shooting inside a Walmart store in Beaver Creek, Ohio was captured by some of the store’s estimated 200 video cameras, but the Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is still refusing to allow the public to see the security footage.
The incident – which occurred just four days before the highly publicized shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri - began after a customer complained that another customer, John Crawford III, was carrying an AR-15 rifle through the store.
Beaver Creek police intervened at the store and ended up killing Crawford, even though the weapon he was carrying was actually a pellet gun he was intending to buy.
Crawford was on the phone with his girlfriend and mother of his two children, LeeCee Johnson, at the time of the incident, and she provided her account of the events based on the phone call.
“He said he was at the video games playing videos, and he went over there by the toy section where the toy guns were,” she said. “The next thing I know, he said, ‘It’s not real,’ and the police start shooting, and they said ‘Get on the ground,’ but he was already on the ground because they had shot him.”
She added: “I could hear him just crying and screaming, I feel like they shot him down like he was not even human.”
Police reported that Crawford had been brandishing the pellet gun and pointing it at other people in the store and they’ve used this as a basis for their defense of a justified shooting.
It is interesting to note that Ohio is a state that has open-carry laws in relation to firearms, meaning that an individual can possess one without a permit in most public spaces as long as it remains fully visible.
What is being widely questioned is why the security camera footage from the Walmart store has not been made public. The state’s Attorney General is opposed to releasing the footage, but it did conduct a re-enactment that is now being criticized by Crawford’s family.
“I don’t know what the Ohio Attorney General was trying to accomplish with this re-enactment,” said Michael Wright an attorney representing the victim’s family. “We are not sure why there needs to be a re-enactment when there’s a video. We still believe the video tape would shed a lot of light on what occurred in Walmart, and we do believe the public has the right to know.”
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