A fight between an off-duty police officer and a civilian becomes deadly
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by Isabel Estrada/PoorNewsNetwork Youth in the MEdia intern They didn't even Pretend to have Court then. I now get 25 years to Life? Your Honor! Give me a Rope and I’ll Hang Myself Mommy don’t you cry. -excerpt from The Unjust JUDICIAL SYSTEM, "Hey Lady, I told you to get moving, you can't stop there," the policeman's hostile voice paralyzed me momentarily. My mom had stopped on Mission St. so that I could get out to buy some Valentines Day cards for my third grade class when a police officer began shouting at us to move the car. She ignored him for a moment so that I could get out, but because I was scared of the man in uniform who was screaming at us I refused to move. After being stopped for about a minute with my mom encouraging me to run out quickly and buy the cards, she gave up and we went to go look for a parking space together. That was when we heard a siren behind us. My mom kept driving so that she could get off of Mission and pull over on Bartlett but the cops thought we were trying to get away. When we did pull over the officer rushed up aggressively to the car for no reason. When he tried to immediately give my mom a ticket, even though she had been stopped for less than a minute, they started screaming at each other. The screaming escalated until the officer pulled my mom out of the car, grabbed her by the arms, pushed her up against the car violently and clamped on the handcuffs. She was then forced into the cop car. My mom was being arrested for refusing to sign the ticket for double parking on a busy street. I had been crying for a while by now. My mom had tried asking if any of the people passing by would be her witness, but they just ignored her, trying to get away from the cops as soon as possible. Two of the officers were trying in broken Spanish to persuade an elderly Mexican woman to be their witness. I was standing on the corner thinking that they were going to leave me there and take my mother until another officer told me to get into the car. I was just glad to be with my mom. When we arrived at the station I remember the officer asking my mother for our address and then turning to me and asking if what she had said was correct. I responded in a whispered voice, "My mommy doesn't lie." The officer snapped back that he wasn't implying that she had. My mom ended up staying in jail overnight and I was picked up by my after school teacher to spend the night at her house. Ever since that time I have had an unreasonable fear of the police. "The two men were in a run of the mill fistfight," said James Thull, a witness to a crime, a crime between a police officer and a citizen that ended in a murder of the citizen. Last Wednesday, I attended a press conference at 850 Bryant St to hear of what seems like a fist fight that one cop took too personally witnessed by James Thull. Throughout the conference, it’s obvious that James is uncomfortable having a microphone up to his mouth. He is tall and lanky, his arms reach deep down into his pockets while his shoulders hunch forward. I notice with some amusement how he’s wearing a kind of scruffy sweater and skater shoes. Behind Thull there are two signs that read, "SFPD Not Above The Law" and "SFPD Does Not Equal Get Out Of Jail Free Card." I’m amazed that the soft-spoken Thull is willing to challenge the entire Police Department. He sees it as "some sort of justice situation." On Saturday February 2nd at around 3:40 pm, Thull was on his way to work when he saw that across the street (about two small car lanes away) there were two men in a fist fight. One was a larger African-American man who he would later find out was Jerome Hooper and the other was a smaller Asian man named Steve Lee. He said in his statement to the Office of Citizen’s Complaint, "it didn’t seem as if one man was attacked by another but as if the two had chosen to engage in a fist fight." Apparently Lee was knocked down twice and then kicked in the chest before Hooper "stepped back away from the Asian man about two full steps." It was then that Lee, while on the ground, pulled out a gun and shot four times in rapid succession into Jerome Hooper’s chest. Thull later found out from his coworkers that the Asian man, Steve Lee, was an off duty police officer. But Thull stated that, "He was not in uniform and as far as I heard and saw, he ever identified himself as a police officer or appeared to be acting as a police officer." On the outside of the Hall there is an engravement in gold lettering "To the faithful and impartial enforcement of the laws with equal justice to all…" And yet, according to Samantha Liapes, director of Bay Area PoliceWatch, "Officer involved shootings are almost never criminally prosecuted and the officers involved rarely even face disciplinary action." In this case it’s been a month and no action has been taken. "Losing a fist fight is not an excuse for killing someone – not for a civilian, not for an officer…It will be a travesty if Mr. Lee is exonerated based solely on the uniform he wasn’t even wearing when he killed Jerome Hooper," stated Liapes. After the press conference in front of the Hall of Justice, my editor Tiny told Thull that he was a hero. His response was to look away, completely embarassed. But cases of police brutality and abuse of authority occur constantly and the main reason that they go unnoticed is because there aren’t enough people like Thull who are willing to contradict the Police Department and its skewed "half-truths." In the case of my mother, the officer was reprimanded after she took him to court but it was not because of any witness but because we had a good lawyer. But regardless of that reprimand I still had to experience the incredible fear and vulnerability of seeing some man pushing my mother around violently, cursing at her, and then I had to see her in a jail cell, all simply because she had lost her temper with him and hadn’t been willing to sign a ridiculous ticket. |