Norris Greenhouse Jr. and Lt. Derrick Stafford, Marksville police officers, were charged last November with second-degree murder and second-degree attempted murder
By Christine Hauser
The New York Times
September 29, 2016
The police video footage of the last moments of 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis’s life shows deputy marshals firing a barrage of bullets at his father’s S.U.V. after a car chase on the dark streets of central Louisiana. It shows his father slumped over the open car window, injured and bleeding.
Minutes later, the words of an officer can be heard: “There’s a juvenile.”
The deputies had fired 18 times into the car, prosecutors say. The boy, strapped to the front passenger seat of the car, was struck five times in the head and chest. He was pronounced dead at the scene. In the aftermath, one of the officers appeared to vomit, according to audio from the footage.
The video was released on Wednesday at a preliminary hearing in a Louisiana court before the deputy marshals, Officer Norris Greenhouse Jr. and Lt. Derrick Stafford, were tried on charges of second-degree murder. It was the first public glimpse of what happened on Nov. 3 in Marksville, a small city near the Mississippi border.
It raised questions about basic police tactics and the wisdom of high-speed chases. But the fatal shooting of the child, who was white, received little of the national attention that has trailed other police killings. It spurred no organized street protests; no viral hashtags; no movement like Black Lives Matter, which was sparked by anger and frustration over a wave of killings of African-Americans by law enforcement officials.
Some differences in the case are clear. For one, it flips the racial narrative that has prompted protests across the nation: white officers shooting unarmed black men or black men legally allowed to carry weapons.
For another, video of the Louisiana killing had been missing from public view until Wednesday. At the time of the shooting, Facebook Live had not become a widespread tool used by people at traffic stops, such as during the fatal shooting in July of Philando Castile in Minnesota, spurring outrage.
Cellphones, body-camera footage and surveillance video of police shootings have also played a key role in protests, such as in the case of Tamir Rice, 12, who was shot dead in 2014 in a Cleveland playground while playing with a replica gun.
In addition, it appears that the father, Chris Few, who survived the confrontation, had taken the police on a chase with his son beside him. And the current movement against police brutality has been primarily focused on the disproportionate number of African-Americans who have been shot and killed by the police, which is backed by data.
An analysis published this year by The Washington Post found that while more whites are killed by the police over all, police shootings were up in the first part of 2016 and black Americans were 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot by officers.
“They are disproportionately likely to attract police attention, and when they do, they are more likely to have force used on them. And so it is just way more likely that something horrible is going to go wrong,” David A. Harris, a professor and expert in police accountability at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
Some families of white victims, however, have been vocal about the fact that their cases are not drawing the same level of outrage and official scrutiny.
“If the victim is white, there just doesn’t seem to be an interest,” Eric S. Bland, a lawyer for the family of Zachary Hammond, a white teenager who was shot dead by a white police officer in South Carolina in 2015, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
Mr. Bland, who sent many emails last year to reporters to point out the lack of coverage of Mr. Hammond’s death, said the case had gone relatively unnoticed compared with that of Samuel DuBose, a black driver who was killed in Cincinnati in 2015. Both cases took place around the same time.
“One of the major things we said is that if Zachary had been a person of color, there would not have been a hotel room available up and down from Atlanta through South Carolina,” Mr. Bland said. “It definitely matters what the color of the skin is.”
One of the rare times that such a killing drew street protests was in the case of Dylan Noble, a white 19-year-old who was fatally shot by officers in Fresno, Calif., on June 25. The police said he was shot after ignoring commands from two officers to show his hands, get on the ground and stop walking toward them.
His death prompted demonstrations in the racially diverse city, with some protesters brandishing signs that said, “While Lives Matter,” The Los Angeles Times reported.
As for Jeremy’s case, it did not resonate in the same category of other police shootings, Mr. Harris said, because it was “really counter to the general narrative of police overreaching and killing someone.”
“In an important way, the fleeing civilian brought it on himself,” Mr. Harris said, voicing what could be one possible public perception of the Louisiana case. “I don’t mean he should be killed for it, but he had had a role in creating this risk that a lot of people would say, ‘This is kind of on him.’”
The case also differed from the shooting of Tamir Rice in that “you can’t conceive that they would have been gunning for the 6-year-old,” Mr. Harris said. “They may or may not have been wrong to have shot the father, but it is kind of inconceivable that they meant to shoot the kid.”
Officer Greenhouse and Lieutenant Stafford were moonlighting as deputy city marshals when they began chasing Jeremy’s father, Mr. Few. Initial reports said they wanted to serve a warrant, but officials have not definitively said why they were trying to arrest him.
The video footage, which lacks audio for the first 27 to 30 seconds, was edited from about 14 minutes to various lengths before being published by news media outlets. It shows the officers chasing Mr. Few’s vehicle, and then pulling up to it when it stops. Officers get out of their vehicle and approach the car, guns drawn.
There are glimpses of Mr. Few with his hands up out the driver’s side window. The deputies appear to begin shooting before the audio begins. Then, after the sound of gunfire, they are heard shouting at Mr. Few to show his hands. His form is blurred out in some footage as he slumps against the car door. More officers arrive and walk over to the vehicle. The body of the child is discovered.
“I never saw a kid in the car, man,” Lieutenant Stafford, accused of firing 14 of the shots, is heard saying. “I never saw a kid, bro.”
Someone in the background can be heard throwing up.
The two men, Marksville police officers, were charged last November with second-degree murder.
Matthew Derbes, a prosecutor in the case, argued in court that the video footage should be released to support the claim that Lieutenant Stafford had a pattern of using excessive force, and because it provided a motive, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Derbes could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
The Associated Press reported that the defense lawyers said Mr. Few had driven recklessly in a two-mile chase and then rammed into Officer Greenhouse’s vehicle as he was exiting it, before the deputies opened fire.
Christopher LaCour, a defense lawyer, was quoted in other reports as saying the deputies had acted in self-defense. “Christopher Few was a suspect before they knew that child was in the car,” Mr. LaCour said. He did not immediately reply to a phone message on Thursday.
Lieutenant Stafford’s trial is set for November, and Officer Greenhouse’s trial is scheduled for March.
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