Tulsa Officer Charged in Fatal Shooting of Black Driver.
A Tulsa police officer was charged on Thursday in last week’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black driver.
At a news conference, the Tulsa County district attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, said the officer, Betty Shelby, who is white, was charged with first-degree manslaughter in the death of Terence Crutcher.
Mr. Crutcher, 40, was killed last Friday evening on a Tulsa street by Officer Shelby, who was responding to reports of a tan S.U.V. abandoned in the middle of the road, with its motor running, the driver’s door open and the driver nowhere in sight.
Video recorded by a police helicopter and a patrol car’s dashboard camera shows Mr. Crutcher raising his hands, walking toward a car and leaning against it. He was then Tasered by one officer, Tyler Turnbough, and fatally shot by Officer Shelby, the department said, though the view from both cameras is obstructed in the moments before those actions.
Tulsa’s police chief, Chuck Jordan, has said that Mr. Crutcher was unarmed and did not have a weapon in his vehicle.
Mr. Kunzweiler said at the news conference that the charge was appropriate after reviewing the police videos as well as the 911 calls and witness statements.
“Although she is charged, she is presumed innocent until a judge or jury determines otherwise,” he said. “I don’t know why things happen in this world the way they do.”
“We need to pray for wisdom and guidance,” Mr. Kunzweiler said.
Officer Shelby’s lawyer, Scott Wood, has said that Mr. Crutcher was behaving erratically and had refused to comply with police commands. He said that Mr. Crutcher had been reaching through the vehicle’s window when he was shot, and that Officer Shelby believed he had a weapon.
The family’s lawyers, who include Benjamin L. Crump, who represented the relatives of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was killed in 2014 by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., have challenged Mr. Wood’s account. Mr. Crump displayed photos at the news conference showing that the window of the S.U.V. had been rolled up.
“I pray this decision provides some peace to the Crutcher family and the people of Tulsa,” the governor, Mary Fallin said, “but we must remain patient as the case works its way through the justice system, where a jury likely will be asked to decide whether Officer Betty Shelby is guilty of the crime. And we must remember that in our justice system, Officer Shelby is innocent until proven guilty.”
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