Articles labeled: police

A 17-year-old in Fresno, California was shot and killed as a police officer tried to defend himself from the teen, who had clubbed him with a baseball bat and was charging at him again. While we understand the cop felt threatened since the teenager was the size of a large adult — 6 feet tall, 250 pounds — couldn’t they have tasered him or something?

The officer fired at the student shortly before noon, after the Roosevelt High School sophomore allegedly came from behind and struck the officer in the head with a crude wooden baseball bat, Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said.

The officer fell down dazed, and reached for the gun in his hip holster, but the clip fell out.

As the student came at him a second time, the officer grabbed a secondary weapon — a semiautomatic handgun he carried as backup — from his ankle holster and fired one or two rounds, Dyer said. The student reportedly died within a few minutes.

The inner old man in us at first said, “You get those little skateboarding punks, officer!” But then we read the “deets”, as the cool kids say, and checked out the video of the incident that recently surfaced on YouTube, and it seems he might have stepped a bit over the line:

The video shows Officer Salvatore Rivieri approach the kids at the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, the area where they apparently were skateboarding. The kids tell Rivieri they didn’t know they couldn’t skateboard there.

“You back-talk me, I’m not your father,” Rivieri says. “You hear me? I’m not your father. You give that attitude to your father. You give it to me, I’ll smack you upside the head. Shut your mouth, I’m talking.”

In the video, after Rivieri pushes the kid on the ground, he takes his skateboard and puts it in his patrol vehicle.

The video in question is below: