Christabel Duah
Newly released body cam footage shows the grim moment an Arizona police officer shot and killed a suspect in a hotel hallway.
Videos by Rare
The shooting took place in January 2016 at a Mesa, Arizona, hotel where officers were responding to a report of someone pointing a gun out of the window.
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In the video, the officers can be heard giving commands to a man and a woman after they leave a hotel room. The man, Daniel Shaver, is issued commands not to move his hands and to crawl toward the responding officers. He can be heard begging the officer’s not to shoot him. As Shaver complies with the directions, he appears to move one of his hands which leads one of the responding officers, Philip Brailsford, to fire his AR-15 five times, killing the unarmed 26-year-old, reports NY Daily News.
Since the incident last year, Brailsford, 27, was removed from the force and was charged with 2nd degree murder and reckless manslaughter. According to the former cop, he testified that he believed Shaver was reaching for a hidden handgun, while a detective in the case thought that Shaver may have just been attempting to pull up his pants that had fallen as he crawled.
Mark Geragos, an attorney for Daniel Shaver’s family, called the incident “an execution, pure and simple. The justice system miserably failed Daniel and his family,” reports TMZ.
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A jury found the ex-officer not guilty on both counts Thursday morning. The video was released hours after the verdict.
“There are no winners in this case, but Mitch Brailsford had to make a split-second decision on a situation that he was trained to recognize as someone drawing a weapon and had one second to react,” his attorney Michael Piccarreta said, according to the Daily News.
“He didn’t want to harm Mr. Shaver… The circumstances that night that were presented led him to conclude that he was in danger. Try to make a decision in one second, life or death. It’s pretty hard.”
Warning: This video contains graphic content.
