By TANYA EISERER
[email protected] Staff Writer
Published: 17 October 2013 06:05 PM
Updated: 17 October 2013 07:14 PM
The family and friends of a mentally ill Rylie man are demanding answers after a Dallas police officer shot him for no apparent reason Monday as he stood in the street outside his home.
A police report says that Officer Cardan Spencer fired on Gerald Bennett, 52, after Bennett walked toward him and his partner, Christopher Watson, with a “knife raised in an aggressive manner.”
But a neighbor’s video surveillance camera recording obtained by WFAA-TV (Channel 8) shows something different: It shows Bennett, who was seated in a chair, initially rolling back from officers as they advance on him. Then Bennett stands up but does not move. His hands remain at his side and he is standing still when officer Cardan opens fire on him.
Bennett is in the intensive care unit of a Dallas hospital after being shot in the abdomen.
His elderly mother, who had called the police to help, now wishes she had never done so.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Joyce Jackson said. “It’s not right. My son did not do anything to those police officers. This is not right what they did.”
In a statement Thursday, Police Chief David Brown said that the department was aware of the surveillance video. He also said the department was in the “very early stages of conducting a thorough criminal investigation of this incident” and that once it is completed, the department’s finding would be sent to the Dallas County district attorney’s office.
Brown said that Spencer has been been placed on administrative leave indefinitely. It is standard practice for the department to conduct criminal investigations on police shootings.
According to the arrest warrant affidavit, Spencer and Watson responded to a disturbance call about a man carrying a knife in the 9400 block of Crimnson Court shortly after noon on Monday.
The officers said they saw Bennett sitting in a black swivel office chair in the middle of the cul de sac with his arms crossed.
The officers got out of the squad car and ordered him to show his hands. The report says Bennett then told them, “You all are gonna need more officers out here,” prompting the officers to pull their weapons.
That affidavit says Bennett then took “several steps toward them with the knife raised in an aggressive manner.”
Spencer, “in fear” for his and his partner’s safety, “fired his duty weapon four times,” striking Bennett in the abdomen, the affidavit states.
Maurice Bunch, the neighbor whose surveillance system captured the confrontation between Bennett and the officers, was standing in his front yard. He said he watched as the uniformed officers drove up and approached Bennett.
“They asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ ” Bunch said. “They were coming at him and he just scooted his chair back. He stood up. At that point, they drew their weapons and said, ‘Freeze.’ They may have said, 'Drop the knife.’
“They just waited for about four or five seconds and they just opened fire on him,” Bunch said, adding that he did not see the knife in Bennett’s hand.
An officer did kick an object away from Bennett after he was shot. Police said in the affidavit that they recovered a knife from the scene.
But Bunch said Bennett definitely never told the officers that they would need more police at the scene.
“That’s a lie,” he said. “They were trying to kill him.”
