In yet another tragedy involving police shooting and killing children, two Louisiana law enforcement officers are under arrest for the November 3 death of 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis and injury of his father Chris Few. The lies that Marksville police officers Norris Greenhouse Jr. and Derrick Stafford told to cover up the shooting have begun to unravel, and they reveal a brutality and blood thirst among officers that is almost unfathomable. According to The Atlantic:
They said that Mardis’s death was a tragic accident that occurred when police tried to serve a warrant on the boy’s father, Chris Few. They said Few had resisted that warrant. When he’d been cornered on a dead-end road after a chase, they said, he had tried to reverse and hit the officers. Then there was an exchange of gunshots, and Jeremy—buckled into the front seat—was tragically caught in the crossfire.
Yet almost none of that turned out to be true.
There appear to have been no outstanding warrants for Few. No gun was found in his truck. Officials said while two of the officers had claimed Few reversed his SUV and tried to ram them, that wasn’t actually true. When officials reviewed body-cam footage of the incident, they found Few actually had his arms in the air when the officers unloaded the barrage on the car. (Few survived the shooting that killed his son.)
“This was not a threatening situation for the police,” said Mark Jeansonne, Few’s attorney. Colonel Mike Edmonson, the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, affirmed that after watching the footage.
While the 18 shots that Greenhouse and Stafford fired into Few’s truck would have likely been unjustified even if their report of the incident were true, the fact that there was no warrant, no gun, and that Few did not act aggressively turn this into what appears to be a cold-blooded murder—this time of a young child—and an attempted murder of Few.
It also turns out that Greenhouse and Stafford were just terrible police officers well before they decided to shoot at a man and child and lie about it. Stafford had been indicted in 2011 for two rapes, although charges were mysteriously dropped. Both Greenhouse and Stafford faced several lawsuits for incidents of brutality. The Associated Press reports:
A woman sued Stafford in 2012 over allegations that he shocked her with a stun gun while she was handcuffed. Another lawsuit accused Stafford of breaking a girl's arm while intervening in a fight on a school bus in 2012.
Stafford and Greenhouse also are defendants in a lawsuit filed by a man who claims officers used excessive force in arresting him at a 2014 festival. Another suit claims Greenhouse and Stafford "stood idly by and did nothing" when another officer assaulted a teenage boy at a Fourth of July celebration in 2013.
And last year, an Avoyelles Parish jury awarded $50,000 to a man who claimed Stafford arrested him in retaliation for making a complaint about him.
Greenhouse and Stafford will likely face the full weight of justice in this case, and while cameras could not save a young child’s life, this is another situation where body cams have exposed police reports to be blatant lies. But it is also a situation where police brutality and violence were coddled and enabled until they culminated in a tragedy that might finally prove to be too much for them to escape. Might.