80-Year Old Man Shot In His Bed By L.A. Sheriff’s Deputy

This post recounts another bad outcome resulting from law enforcement CopsAbusePowerconducting a raid based on a warrant that was obtained through a dubious assertion (of meth cooking, based on “the strong odor of chemicals”) on the part of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

From a post by reporter Caleb Howe at the online Independent Journal Review, with my editing for brevity:

Deputies approached the house, and what happened next is where things get murky.  The deputies said they announced their presence upon entering and were met in the hallway by the 80-year-old man, wielding a gun and stumbling towards them.  The deputies later changed the story when the massive bloodstains on Mallory’s mattress indicated to investigators that he’d most likely been in bed at the time of the shooting.  Investigators also found that an audio recording of the incident revealed a discrepancy in the deputies’ original narrative.

That discrepancy was the timing of when the instruction to “drop the gun” was given.  Upon listening to the recording, the command from shooter Sgt. John Bones appears to have come after he opened fire, fatally shooting Mallory six times.

Mallory never fired a weapon, and no methamphetamine was found in the home.

Mallory was a retiree.  An elderly man, hard of hearing, who apparently did not understand who was invading his home armed to the teeth.  It was a high tension and very dangerous situation.

And then there is the video below (over seven minutes long, but worth your time), from Reason-TV, which also includes this bit:  “When it was all over, Eugene Mallory died of six gunshot wounds from Sgt. John Bones’ MP-5 9mm submachine gun.  When a coroner arrived, he found the loaded .22 caliber pistol the two deputies claimed Mallory had pointed at them on the bedside table.  Mallory had not fired of a single shot.”

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If you paid attention to the 30-second segment beginning at 4:17, it is obvious that the shooter concocted an outright lie about the circumstances in order to make his action appear more justified.  This seems to have become standard operating procedure in some law enforcement jurisdictions.