Back in July, Texas cops shot David Collie outside a Fort Worth apartment complex, paralyzing him from the waist down. Police claimed that the 33-year-old man threatened them with a box cutter, but newly-released dashcam video of the incident backs up Collie's assertion that he was unarmed.
On the night of July 27th, police were searching for two shirtless black men who had just robbed a gas station and fled on foot. Two Texas cops stopped at a nearby apartment complex and saw Collie, who they assumed was one of the robbers because he was not wearing a shirt. The dashcam video shows the two cops exiting their car, one with a flashlight and the other with his pistol drawn. Collie is seen raising his arm to point into the distance, and then is immediately gunned down by the police.
Collie was shot in the back, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and dependent on medical care for the rest of his life. He said that he was unarmed at the time and that he was only pointing to his girlfriend's apartment, where he was headed that night. Police charged him with aggravated assault on a public servant, but a grand jury did not find there was cause to indict him.
The video, released this week by Collie's attorney, Nate Washington, does not show the man threatening police, and also shows that he was standing 34 feet away from the cops, way too far away to attack them with a box cutter. Collie “was only trying to comply,” Washington said. “These officers pulled up, they’re moving kind of quickly, one of them has a gun drawn. He told me ‘I was scared. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do.’ When I met him in the hospital, he told me, ‘Nate, I was trying to comply and they shot me in the back.’”
“It is the sort of racial bias and the sort of racial prejudice that says you should be afraid of the African American man,” Washington said. “You watch that video, you have an officer that sees Mr. Collie and within 10 seconds puts a bullet in his back. That doesn’t happen to other folks. That happens to African Americans.”
