The Dallas News is reporting:
A fired Balch Springs officer faces a murder charge in the fatal shooting of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards over the weekend as he left a party, according to law enforcement officials.
A judge signed a murder warrant Friday afternoon…
...The warrant says Oliver "committed this offense while he intended to cause serious bodily injury in an act clearly dangerous to human life."
The New York Times is reporting on this now as well:
...The Balch Springs police chief fired Mr. Oliver from the department on Tuesday.
The issuing of the arrest warrant comes the day before Jordan’s funeral on Saturday. Friends and relatives are planning to gather at 11 a.m. at Mesquite Friendship Baptist Church in nearby Mesquite, Tex. The funeral is closed to the public.
As you may recall Jordan was riding in a car after leaving a party when the officer, for no explicable reason that didn’t prove to be a complete and utter lie, decided to shoot at the car. Jordan was hit by a bullet and pronounced dead at the hospital.
And yet whether the officer, Roy Oliver, will be convicted of anything, let alone murder, is always in doubt.
Just getting a District Attorney to bring charges is all but impossible, as the case of Tamir Rice so unjustly illustrates.Even when an officer is caught on film shooting a person in the back who is running and many yards away a jury will fail to convict, as in the case of Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott.
(Slager just days ago did plead out to a federal charge of using excess force to deny Scott his civil rights; however bringing Federal charges is something that is extremely unusual in these cases).
What is perhaps most interesting here is the speed of the charge. Often months, even years, will go by before charges are either brought or ultimately dropped, as in the case of Amilcar Perez-Lopez, shot in the back by SFPD. I don’t know how the Oliver video (from body cams) could be more damning than that of Slager, but perhaps it is.
Here’s an excerpt from Shaun King’s amazingly tragic article, relating what happened to the car passengers who were not killed after they stopped the car and got out…
As police demanded that the boys face away from them, and walk backwards, with their hands held above their heads, one of the cops, according to the sons, loudly mocked them for not knowing their left from their right.
They had just seen their brother shot in the forehead with a rifle. The rifle was fired repeatedly from such close range that the boys said their ears were ringing from the shots.
At that point, Vidal, Kevon, and their friend, who was in the car with them, were not only traumatized beyond comprehension, they were seriously wondering if they'd be shot and killed next.
Their brother had done nothing to deserve such brutality and it crossed their mind that the men who just killed him might kill them next.