The father of Terence Crutcher says when he watched video footage of his unarmed son’s fatal shooting by a Tulsa, Okla., police officer, he was overcome with emotion.
“I lost it,” Rev. Joey Crutcher told CNN on Wednesday morning. “It was the most devastating thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”
On Monday, the Tulsa Police Department released videos from a police helicopter and a police cruiser dashcam that show the 40-year-old Crutcher as he walked to his SUV with his hands over his head when he was shot and killed Friday evening. Police had been responding to a stalled vehicle in the middle of a road.
The officer who shot Crutcher, 42-year-old Betty Shelby, was placed on paid administrative leave as police investigate the case as a possible homicide. An attorney for Shelby, Scott Wood, told the Tulsa World newspaper that she had recently undergone drug-recognition training and believed Crutcher was acting erratically and under the influence of PCP.
Tulsa police say they found the drug inside Crutcher’s car.
“I think that the police are trying to figure out a way to justify blaming Terence Crutcher for his own death,” Benjamin Crump, an attorney for the Crutcher family, said on CNN. “We don’t know what they found in the car. We will take it at their word because they got all the ‘evidence’ in their custody.”
The U.S. Department of Justice has launched its own investigation to determine whether a civil rights violation occurred during Crutcher’s death.
