Staunton Police Chief Jim Williams released a lengthy public statement today on the Sept. 22 officer-involved shooting of a Black man at the Staunton Walmart, and the TL;DR report that I can give you having read it is: we don’t know any more now after the statement than we did before.
For instance, we didn’t get any new details of what led to the shooting.
Per the statement from the police chief, “a Staunton police officer arrived at the Walmart parking lot after being dispatched to a 911 call from a citizen,” and the officer made contact with the victim, Montique Treymayne Gaston, 39, of Portsmouth, in the parking lot, “at which point an altercation took place.”
We still don’t know if Gaston was armed, or if the officer claims to have thought he was armed.
All we know is that during whatever altercation there supposedly was, the officer – still unnamed publicly – fired, struck Gaston, and despite reported efforts to render life-saving aid, Gaston was pronounced dead at the scene.
ICYMI
- Police: One dead in officer-involved shooting at Staunton Walmart
- Staunton NAACP on police shooting: ‘Transparency is not the enemy of a fair investigation’
Williams said in his statement that the officer was wearing a body-worn camera, that the camera “recorded the entirety of the incident,” and that the recording was turned over to the Virginia State Police, which, per protocol, is conducting the official investigation of the incident.
Because the investigation is considered to still be ongoing, there will be no additional public release of information, which Williams seems to acknowledge is an obvious source of public frustration.
“While we understand that the public has questions, we are requesting patience as the investigation will take some time to complete,” Williams said.
I can speak to the public frustration over the lack of information personally; people aren’t being patient with me, and I’m just a journalist here, in the dark as much as anybody else – hoping that maybe somebody who was an eyewitness will get in touch with something I can use to pierce the shield.
As we’re all waiting for the details, we’re frustrated, and I get it – the shooting happened a week ago now, and all we’re hearing is crickets, as the matter is now in the information purgatory that is an active police investigation.
The Staunton Branch NAACP went public on Friday, three days after the shooting, with a public call for transparency from the Staunton Police Department, in which the local NAACP raised issue with how local authorities “have not publicly explained what precipitated the encounter, the sequence of events leading to the use of deadly force, or other basic circumstances surrounding the shooting.”
It took the Staunton PD four days to respond to that public request, and guess what, we’re still not there, in terms of anything resembling transparency.
You can guarantee that if this had played out with the situation having been reversed, with Gaston having shot the cop, we’d know every last detail of how the encounter went down, millisecond by millisecond.
I digress.
“We recognize that the death of Mr. Gaston is deeply painful, and that this pain extends far beyond the immediate circumstances of this incident,” Williams said. “For many members of our African American community, this shooting raises difficult and painful concerns about race, fairness, and whether every person can have confidence that they will be treated with dignity and equal protection under the law. Those concerns deserve to be heard and taken seriously.”
I get it, that Williams feels like he’s over a barrel here, too, and to his credit, he’s at least making the effort to appear like he’s trying.
“At this time, we do not have all of the facts, and it would be inappropriate for me to prejudge the investigation or reach conclusions before the evidence has been fully examined. At the same time, waiting for the facts does not mean that we should ignore the pain, fear, anger or questions that people are experiencing,” Williams said.
“We will support a thorough, impartial and independent investigation of this incident,” Williams said. “We will make information available to the public to the fullest extent permitted by law, and we will cooperate fully with those responsible for determining what happened and whether the actions taken were lawful and consistent with policy and training.”
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Chris Graham
