“This is not the end. This is just the beginning of this fight for this family,” he said during a press conference.
The team of attorneys said they are seeking the complete case file on the shooting from the Beavercreek Police Department and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. They also will continue to push for U.S. Justice Department shepherding of the case.
Also Thursday, the Ohio attorney general’s office released the Montgomery County coroner’s report on Crawford’s autopsy.
The report also says Crawford had the parent compound of marijuana in his system at the time of his death. The report found that Crawford had used marijuana in the past several hours, said Dr. Kent Harshbarger, the coroner.
“What I can say is that it is acute use, that is recent, (within) hours,” Harshbarger said.
Police shot Crawford, 22, of Fairfield, at a Beavercreek Walmart on Aug. 5 after a 911 caller told dispatchers that Crawford was waving around what appeared to be a rifle at fellow store shoppers. Beavercreek police said Crawford did not respond to orders to drop the rifle, and an officer shot him. Crawford had picked up an unpacked bb gun from a store shelf minutes before he was shot.
A special Greene County grand jury returned no indictment in the case, voting against potential charges of murder, reckless homicide and negligent homicide against Beavercreek police officers Sean Williams and Sgt. David M. Darkow. On Wednesday, Piepmeier, the special prosecutor who presided over the grand jury, said neither Crawford nor responding officers did anything wrong.
“I think this is some (expletive); this was a set-up from the beginning,” Crawford’s mother, Tressa Sherrod, said in reaction to the grand jury’s decision Wednesday.
John Crawford Jr. said there should have been an indictment because his son was murdered.
‘He did not have a chance’
“The officer went in and virtually shot him on sight,” Crawford Jr. said. “He did not have a chance.”
Piepmeier said Wednesday that police will “have to live the rest of their lives knowing that even though they had a justified use of force, they took the life of someone that didn’t need to die.”
The U.S. Justice Department has said it would conduct an independent review of the shooting.
Crawford was black, and the officers are white. Attorneys for Crawford’s family said they hope a federal grand jury will consider if or how race was a factor in the shooting.
“It was an unarmed black man that got shot and killed in Walmart, and we can’t hide from that,” Wright said. “We believe that, yes, had Mr. Crawford been Caucasian, maybe the outcome would be different. But it’s very hard at this point to say that that, in fact, was the case.”
Attorney Shean Williams, of the Cochran firm’s Atlanta office, participated in Wright’s press conference. Cochran, who died in 2005, is best known nationally for participating in the 1994 defense of O.J. Simpson, who had been charged with killing his former wife and her friend. Simpson was acquitted.
As for a possible civil lawsuit, Wright said the Crawford family is weighing its options.
Said Richard Schulte, partner of Wright: “Mr. Crawford wants to see his son’s name vindicated.”
“John Crawford did nothing wrong,” Wright said. “John Crawford did not commit a crime. John Crawford posed no immediate threat to anyone or the (responding police) officers. John Crawford was shot for no reason and without justification.”
“Justice is simply getting a conviction (of) the man who killed my son,” said Crawford Jr.
Crawford family attorneys charged Piepmeier with acting as “defense counsel” for the police officers involved in the shooting.
“The grand jury proceedings are supposed to be confidential,” Wright said. “But Piepmeier came out and gave all kinds of evidence yesterday that was presented to the grand jury. So we don’t believe that that was proper.”
DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney denied the allegations, saying DeWine took pains to remove himself from the process.
‘Not an active shooter’
In a press conference Wednesday, Piepmeier said police are trained today to quickly and aggressively confront “active shooters” or people they believe to be active shooters, without waiting for backup. Attorneys and Crawford’s parents objected to that characterization, saying Crawford had not been shooting.
“This was not Columbine,” Wright said, referring to the location of a 1999 mass shooting at a Colorado high school. “This was not Sandy Hook. It’s insulting to this family that Piepmeier mentioned Mr. Crawford in those same sentences. He was not an active shooter. He was only a kid shopping at Walmart.”
Piepmeier did not respond to a message Thursday seeking comment. On Wednesday, a Piepmeier spokeswoman said the prosecutor could not answer questions about “confidential information.”
The autopsy report on Crawford confirms the widely held understanding that Crawford died of a gunshot wound to his torso. The death was ruled a “homicide,” which means the deliberate killing of a human being. In this use, the term homicide does not address whether or not it was justified.
The Associated Press contributed to this story
About the Author
