The eight bullets that killed Stephon Clark struck him in the back and side, a second autopsy commissioned by his family revealed Friday afternoon.
The findings confirm what appeared clear from the infrared helicopter video Sacramento police officials released of Clark’s killing last week: That Clark made no move toward officers and seemed to be going to ground when they opened fire in the dark from the corner of his grandmother’s house.
“Death took about three to 10 minutes,” forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu said Friday at a press conference to announce his findings. The family had asked Omalu to conduct a separate, independent autopsy from that which was done by a city coroner. The eight shots — out of 20 fired by two officers whose names have not yet been released — hit Clark in the back, thigh, and neck, he said.
Police videos released within days of Clark’s death only heightened the sense of outrage already alive in the Sacramento community after the initial news that Clark had been holding a cell phone rather than the weapon officers believed they saw.
Body camera footage is shaky, dark, and of little assistance in understanding what happened. But the infrared aerial footage shows Clark accessing his grandmother’s yard by hopping the fence from a neighbor’s property — a line of behavior some anonymous internet message board posters have latched onto as somehow justifying the police violence, although it’s also how you’d describe Ferris Bueller’s acrobatic sprint home in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — and then trying to hide behind the house as officers run up the driveway with guns leveled.
The heat-sensitive footage shows many showers of sparks as officers continued to fire after Clark had fallen to the ground. It shows that Clark first fell to his hands and knees for a moment, then all the way prone, but never moved toward police from the position he’d taken against the rear wall of the home before the officers turned the corner.
Ben Crump, the lawyer representing Clark’s family, “said the autopsy findings contradicted the police narrative of Clark’s death” according to the Washington Post. Police representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though Crump was likely referring to one of the officers’ claim on the body camera footage that “he came up, and he kind of approached us hands out and then fell down” in the minutes after the killing.
The darker body camera footage also establishes that about six minutes pass before any officer attempts to provide first aid to the man they’d just shot, a painful slowness that’s all too common in police killings.
Shortly after an officer mentions the need to attempt CPR, another is heard saying “Hey, mute?” Then the audio drops out. Police officials have not yet explained why the officers muted their body cameras or if that action complies with department policies on when officers may cut the mics off while in the field.