You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Texas: Video Shows Fort Worth Officer Shooting Black Man in the Back

HeadlineDec 29, 2016

In Texas, the Fort Worth Police Department faces new charges of racism and excessive force, after the release of a video showing an officer shooting a black man in the back. Thirty-three-year-old David Collie was left paralyzed after the encounter in July. Collie’s lawyer, Nate Washington, released a copy of a dash cam video on Wednesday capturing a Fort Worth police officer and a local sheriff’s deputy opening fire mere seconds after leaving their car. This is Nate Washington.

Nate Washington: “We know that the officers have indicated that they were telling Mr. Collie to come to them, to walk to them. They were telling him to, you know, take your hands out of your pockets, things of that sort. And so, as he attempted to comply, raise his hands as they told him to, they shot him.”

Collie spent 61 days in a hospital handcuffed to his bed and was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Washington said the officers were off duty at the time of the shooting. Police initially accused Collie of pointing a box cutter at the officers, but the video does not appear to back up the claim. A grand jury declined to indict Collie on aggravated assault charges. A Fort Worth police spokesperson says an investigation remains ongoing, and a case against the officer has not yet been presented to a separate grand jury. The release of the video came less than a week after a viral video showed an African-American mother and her teenage daughters being violently arrested by a white Fort Worth officer—after the woman dialed 911 to report an assault on her 7-year-old son.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top