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Sunday, March 3, 2019
Saturday, California District Attorney Anne-Marie Schubert told the public that the two Sacramento police officers who fatally shot 22-year-old Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s back yard last year would not face charges.
“The law requires that we judge the reasonableness of an officer’s actions based upon the circumstances confronting them at that moment of time,” Schubert said in a press conference. She went on to add, “We know [Clark] fled from the officers after being told to stop, we know that he continued into the backyard, and we know that when he continued into the backyard, he rounded that corner, and he went to the end of that yard and he turned around[.] He didn’t continue to flee. He turned around and he was in a shooting stance with his arms extended.” She went on to explain why the police sincerely believed that Clark had a gun, such as one officer’s claim to have seen a flash of light like the reflection off a gun.
“I don’t care if he was a criminal. None of that matters,” mother of the deceased, SeQuette Clark, told the public. “What matters is how those officers came with lethal force around a corner, on a vandalism call, after my son and gunned him down — when he had nothing but a cellphone in his hand.”
Stephon Clark was killed on March 18 of last year. Police received a 911 call about a man breaking glass on cars and a house. Later, DNA evidence would indicate this was indeed Clark. Officers Jared Robinet and Terrence Mercadal pursued Clark into what they later learned was his grandmother’s back yard, where, according to Schubert, they believed he had a gun, and they discharged their own weapons twenty times, hitting Clark at least seven. Clark was later found to have been unarmed. The event was recorded on the officers’ body cameras. After Clark’s death, large protests and demonstrations called for criminal charges against the two shooters.
After the press conference, religious leaders spoke to the press outside City Hall. “I’m first just heartbroken, as a black man, as a Sacramentan that has heard her demonize Stephon Clark and then not hold these officers accountable,” Pastor Les Simmons told the press. “I think our community is really hurting right now.”
During the press conference, Schubert said that Clark’s phone and other personal records showed that he had been in some trouble with the law before and having difficulties with his children’s mother. He had called a friend and talked about suicide. Former police chief Rick Braziel later said he had expected Schubert to claim Clark may have been attempting to commit suicide by cop, to provoke the police into killing him, but Schubert did not. When asked about this in a follow-up interview, Schubert explicitly said that she did not mean to suggest this.
The mayor of Sacramento, Darryl Steinberg, responded to the district attorney’s announcement with a renewed apology to the Clark family: “Today, the district attorney said she focused on a single question: Did the officers who shot Stephon Clark commit a crime? Her answer was, ‘No[.]’ Our community and its leadership have different questions. Was the outcome wrong? Was the outcome unacceptable? The answer to both questions is yes.”