NORTH MIAMI, Fla. (AP) — A Black therapist who was trying to calm an autistic patient in the middle of the street says he was shot by police even though he had his hands in the air and repeatedly told them that no one was armed.
“As long as I’ve got my hands up, they’re not going to shoot me. This is what I’m thinking. They’re not going to shoot me,” he told WSVN-TV (https://bit.ly/2ac7zm1 ) from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from a gunshot wound to his leg. “Wow, was I wrong.”
“I realize there are many questions about what happened on Monday night. You have questions, the community has questions, we as a city, we as a member of this police department and I also have questions,” he said. “I assure you we will get all the answers.”
The chief said officers responded following reports of a man with a gun threatening to kill himself, and the officers arrived “with that threat in mind” — but no gun was recovered from the scene.
“Lay down on your stomach,” Kinsey says to his patient in the video, which was shot from a distance and provided to the Miami Herald (https://hrld.us/2ahReMa) on Wednesday. “Shut up!” responds the patient, who is sitting cross-legged in the road, playing with his toy.
“He has a toy truck in his hand! A toy truck!” Kinsey says to officers who have their guns drawn. Kinsey said he was more worried about his patient than himself.
An officer then fired three times, striking Kinsey in the leg, assistant police chief Neal Cuevas told the newspaper. The video posted on websites does not include the moment of the shooting.
“I’m telling them again, ‘Sir, there is no need for firearms. I’m unarmed, he’s an autistic guy. He got a toy truck in his hand,” Kinsey said.
“When he shot me, it was so surprising … It was like a mosquito bite, and when it hit me, I’m like, I still got my hands in the air, and I said, ‘No, I just got shot,’” Kinsey said.
After the shooting, Kinsey said he asked an officer why he was shot and he said “‘I don’t know.’”
Attorney General Loretta Lynch told reporters Thursday that the Justice Department was aware of the shooting and was working with law enforcement in the area to gather all of the facts and to decide how to proceed.
“We don’t know enough about it at this point in time,” she said, when asked whether federal authorities would begin their own investigation.
U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson represents the area and said she was in shock after watching the video.
“From what I saw, he was lying on the ground with his hands up. Freezing. But he was still shot,” she said.
“This is not typical of North Miami,” she said. “We’re not accustomed to this tension. … This cannot happen again.”
The officer has been placed on administrative leave, which is standard.
Kinsey’s attorney, Hilton Napoleon, provided the cellphone video to the Herald.
In an interview with The Associated Press, he declined to say from whom he had obtained the video.
The video does not show the moment of the shooting, and Napoleon said there was about a two-minute gap in which the person who shot the video had switched off, thinking nothing more noteworthy would happen. It then briefly shows the aftermath of the shooting.
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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
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