Family Of Kadir Skinner To Sue City:
The family of Kadir Skinner, the 19-year-old who was fatally shot by Wilmington police last month, announced Tuesday they will seek $25 million from the city in a wrongful death lawsuit.
The announcement was made during a press conference the family held with their attorneys on the same day that state and city officials released body camera footage from the night Skinner was shot.
The footage shows a chaotic 28 seconds between the moment the shooting officer leaves his vehicle to chase Skinner, before firing his weapon and handcuffing the wounded teen on the pavement of a Wilmington street. Another three-and-a-half minutes pass after Skinner was shot before officers place him into a patrol car and take him to Wilmington Hospital, where he died.
During the press conference, the family’s attorney Harry Daniels referenced that the video also shows a loose dog behind Skinner as the officer begins his pursuit.
“If they continue to shoot and kill our Black men down in the street as they’re running from a dog. If they do not want to hold those who do it accountable, then we’re gonna try to hold them accountable in their pocketbooks,” Daniels said.
The wrongful death lawsuit has not yet been filed. But the attorney said the family sent the city a notice of a claim on Thursday — a required step before the lawsuit can be filed.
Wilmington officials have said officers chased Skinner after they observed him walking out of a home and pointing a gun at a large crowd of people. The family disputes the claim. The body camera footage does not show the moments prior to the foot chase.
Wrongful death suits are essential, because LEOBOR comes close to giving cops the right to kill with impunity. We can get LEOBOR reform if we elect more progressives to the General Assembly.
Trump’s Speech. Don’t know if anybody watched, but it was, of course, disgraceful:
Mr. Trump’s prime-time speech from the East Room of the White House was an astonishing spectacle featuring a president intent on persuading the country that its elections cannot be trusted, at least not the ones where he or his allies fall short. He cited selectively declassified documents to make sensational claims about vulnerabilities of the election system, although nothing he revealed proved any outcomes were actually changed.
The exercise underscored how much Mr. Trump in his second term has come to be obsessed with relitigating the 2020 election and finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 election. In the 18 months since he returned to office, he has installed election deniers in key positions, sought to change the rules to make it harder to cast ballots, seized voting records in a bid to prove his conspiracy theories and purged officials who investigated his efforts to overturn his election defeat six years ago.
“It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick,’” said Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing, he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.”
With just less than 16 weeks until the next election, the pressing issue is where Mr. Trump plans to take the matter. He used the speech to announce that he has ordered the F.B.I. and other agencies to investigate election interference. He also pushed Congress again to pass legislation to require proof of citizenship to register and photo identification to cast ballots. But Senate Republicans have made clear to him again and again that there are not enough votes to pass it.
The Maine ICE Agent Was Completely And Totally Unfit To Be An ICE Agent:
AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press.
David Brouillette has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of attacking women in his life over the years, and one shared a voicemail with the AP from last winter in which he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.
DHS, which hasn’t released the name of the officer who killed Durán Guerrero, has said the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”
Brouillette, 37, told his ex-wife Ashley Brouillette late last year that he had been hired by ICE. She said that because of his long history of psychiatric issues, she thought he was having a mental health episode and she didn’t believe him. She didn’t realize he’d been telling the truth until this week, when videos began circulating online of the moments surrounding the shooting.
David Brouillette doesn’t appear to have a criminal record in Maine, as a check with the Maine Department of Public Safety returned no records for him.
But hundreds of family court records obtained from the Augusta District Court clerk’s office detail years of allegations of physical and verbal abuse raised by his second ex-wife on behalf of herself and his daughters.
The ex-wife — whom the AP is not identifying because she fears retaliation — alleged that he had stalked and harassed her and physically and verbally abused his daughter, according to multiple requests for temporary protection orders. Brouillette tackled his teenage daughter and smashed spaghetti in her hair, and during another outburst, he dragged his daughter around the house as she cried, she said.
I stand corrected. He was the perfect ICE agent.
Abolish ICE.
What do you want to talk about?
