You don’t have a warrant.” As a second cop leapt over the railing, a third cop, who appears to be Eleazar Alejandro, began shooting his pistol through the window into the apartment.īody camera footage showing San Antonio police firing into Melissa Perez's apartment, killing her. As Perez approached him he pulled back and drew his gun and pointed at Perez, warning her, “You are going to get shot.” Perez, responded “Shoot me. a cop tried to break into the apartment through the window. Perez is heard telling the police, “Don’t come in.” After police gathered themselves they attempted to break into Perez’s apartment again. One cop leapt over the balcony railing and proceeded to rip out the screen on a window leading into Perez’s apartment. By this time there were multiple police officers standing outside the patio of Perez’s first floor apartment. In the blurred out footage, it appears that as the person turns to walk away, the cop yells, “Hey lady, get over here.” The woman, believed to be Perez, continues to walk away from the cop, who again tells them to “come over here.” The footage then cuts to an hour later, just after 1:40 a.m. Police documents assert that during initial questioning Perez told them she was cutting the wires because “the FBI was listening to her.” In the video released by the police, the footage begins with a cop approaching a person and their dog who are standing in the grass outside an apartment complex. Police claim that they were initially dispatched to the Southwest Side apartment complex because Perez had been cutting the wires of an external fire alarm system. Instead, it appears that the police had grown impatient with the woman, who was obviously in the throes of severe mental crisis, and decided to escalate the situation in order to force a violent conclusion. The heavily edited police body-camera video shows that none of the three cops who fired into Perez’s apartment was in danger at the time of the shooting. Of the 1,165 individuals shot and killed by police in 2018, the Washington Post confirmed that more than 200, at least 25 percent, were suffering from a mental health crisis at the time of their deaths. Nearly one in five US adults has a mental illness and people with an untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by police compared to other people, according to a 2015 study from the Treatment Advocacy Center. Perez’ foundational rights, but that this behavior stems from many systemic failures within SAPD,” Packard said. “We believe SAPD’s conduct was not only an egregious constitutional violation of Ms. In the press conference, McManus said it appeared that Perez was having a “mental health crisis” and that the shootings were “not consistent with SAPD’s policy and training.” He said the police “placed themselves in a situation where they used deadly force, which was not reasonable given all the circumstances as we now understand them.” In an interview with the San Antonio Express-News, Brent Packard, a lawyer working with the Perez family on a civil lawsuit against the city, confirmed that Perez had a history of mental illness. A portion of the video was released during a Friday night press conference held less than 20 hours after the shooting. The shooting of Perez was caught on multiple police body cameras. Less than 2 percent of these killings result in any charges against police. As has been the case for the last decade, on average, US police kill three people a day and over 1,000 a year. According to Mapping Police Violence, Perez is one of at least 504 people who have been killed by police in America so far this year. Ī GoFundMe organized to help cover Perez’s funeral expenses notes, “she did not have life insurance and her children do not have the means to pay for her burial … please pray for her four children and relatives that she leaves behind.” In an attempt to cut off mass anger at the latest heinous police slaying, San Antonio police chief William McManus announced that the three officers who shot and killed Perez had been suspended without pay, charged with murder and taken into custody. The three San Antonio police officers have been charged with murder this past Friday in the fatal shooting of 46-year-old Melissa Perez. Alfred Flores and Officers Eleazar Alejandro and Nathaniel Villalobos.
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