California Cops Fatally Shoot Man Who Witnesses Say Was Backing Away From Them

Once again  a fatal police shooting is in the limelight. Police officers in Salinas, California responded to a call of a man exposing himself, and of attempted to break into a property.

From the point they initiated contact with the man, the police statements and the witness statements start to deviate…ending up as nothing even remotely similar to each other.

The Monterey County Herald quoted Salinas police Cmdr. Vince Maiorana as saying that the man was initially unresponsive when police tried to approach him about the alleged attempted break-in, then began to act strangely:

“Officers end up talking to this individual, trying to find out what he’s doing and what the situation was based upon the original 911 call,” Maiorana said. “This individual started to wave the gardening shears at the officers. We tried to deploy a Taser; the Taser did not work and as the officers tried to detain this individual, this individual pulled the gardening shears and actually attacked the officers with the gardening shears.

“In response, the officers, fearing for their personal safety, shot this individual and he is now deceased.”

Cell phone video footage obtained by The Herald  shows that two officers with guns drawn and only a few feet away from the man fired four or five shots in broad daylight on Tuesday in a commercial part of Salinas, a town of roughly 154,000.

“There’s some split-second decisions that have to be made by the officer,”Maiorana told the Herald.”When the officer commanded this individual to drop the shears and to get down on the ground, this individual actually attacked the officer with the gardening shears.”

Now witnesses give quite a different version of events. They say the taser did work, and that Osman Hernandez was on the ground, stunned from the taser when the police officers opened fire.

“They killed Osman like a dog as he lay on the ground. Why are we to trust them investigating themselves? Why does it take so many bullets to the head to subdue a man who is already lying on the ground? Osman’s life had value. We want the truth,”

A KSBW report added that the one eyewitness told the network that Hernandez was on the ground and stunned from the taser when police fired no fewer than four shots.

The shooting happened outside the Y Delicia’s Bakery at Sanborn Plaza. It was the third fatal officer-involved shooting in Salinas this year and the second one in the last two weeks.

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