[GRAPHIC]Uniformed killers walk free after beating and tasing unarmed homeless man to death

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Kelly Thomas, before and after dealing with Fullerton Police.
FULLERTON, CA — In 2011, a group of police officers brutally beat an unarmed homeless man to death on a street corner with clubs, fists, and repeated electric shocks. The story got national attention when the video of the attack showed the mentally ill man wailed for his father as police bludgeoned him mercilessly. The story reached its heartbreaking conclusion when a jury announced that the police officers who had been charged with his death would all walk away as free men. The frustrating story shows that even in the rare instances when police officers face criminal charges for their brutality, their position of power makes it incredibly easy for them to get away with murder. The only objection the Fullerton Police Department had with the behavior of their officers was their use of profanity.

Easy Prey

The incident took place approximately two and a half years ago on a hot summer night in Fullerton. On July 5th, 2011, at approximately 8:30 p.m., police were investigating a report of parked cars that had been burglarized. Their efforts brought them near a bus station where they approached a shirtless “homeless-looking man” carrying a bag. That man was a local transient named Kelly Thomas, 37, who was always found downtown and suffered from schizophrenia.

An undated photo of Kelly Thomas’ life on the streets. (Source: Orange County Register)

Many officers of the department were familiar with Thomas, including Officer Manuel Ramos, who initiated contact with him on the street corner. Thomas was chronically homeless and had been the subject of police attention in the past. With his mental illness, he lived by sifting through garbage cans and sleeping on benches. But Thomas was not prone to violence, a department spokesperson later stated.
Police officers spent several minutes questioning Thomas. They asked him if he had drank alcohol that day, and about the contents of his bag. Thomas had an obviously hard time following basic commands and displayed a lot of cognitive issues.

Allegedly police believed that Thomas may have been the burglar, but did not attempt to handcuff him while he was seated, posing no threat. Instead, Officer Ramos turned away to fetch a pair of rubber gloves, then placed them on his hands, and leaned over Thomas to threaten him. “See my fists, they’re going to f*** you up,” the officer menaced. Thomas was soon on his feet and two officers closed on him with batons already raised in their hands. Thomas backed up and resisted when they tried to cuff him. Things escalated swiftly. Thomas was violently taken to the ground. They wrestled with him and bludgeoned him with fists and batons. They called for backup.

More officers arrived and Thomas was attacked by an even greater force. The third officer on the scene, Jay Cicinelli, beat Thomas with the back of a taser and shocked him several times. They struck him in the back of the head with their elbows and a flashlight. Officer Joseph Wolfe joined in the fray by viciously striking Thomas with a baton while he lay helpless. Police hogtied him and slammed his face into concrete. A total of six officers participated in subduing him as he squirmed on the ground, confused and pleading for help.

Fullerton police during the killing of Kelly Thomas. (Source: Getty Images)

A crowd gathered and gawked for the several long, agonizing minutes that police repeatedly beat and tasered Thomas until he was an unrecognizable bloody mess.

Audio of the incident captures Thomas’s voice desperately crying for his father and the distinctive sound of electric shocks repeatedly being used against him. “Dad! … Dad! … Dad! … Dad!…” the man wailed. He could be heard apologizing and saying he couldn’t breathe.

“Dad, they are killing me!” were among his last words. Eventually Thomas stopped moving.
Officers were recorded laughing with EMTs over Thomas’s listless body, next to the pool of blood shimmering in the streetlights.

Aftermath

A coverup began immediately as police confiscated cameras from witnesses of the assault. Police even went so far as to rip the film out of one female witness’s camera after the incident. But the theft of cameras would not keep the truth from being exposed, as a surveillance camera mounted to the bus station captured the confrontation and the violence.
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Kelly Thomas in a police-induced coma.


After the beating, two of the officers reported injuries after the assault. When asked what parts of their bodies had been injured, Goodrich said, “It was more than just their fists,” but would not elaborate. The gang evidently had sore fists andsore elbows from hitting Thomas so many times.

Thomas suffered from severe head and neck injuries. He remained in a coma for five days and was was taken off life-support on July 10th.

“When I first walked into the hospital, I looked at what his mother described as my son … I didn’t recognize him,” said Ron Thomas, Kelly’s father.

“This is cold-blooded, aggravated murder,” he said, after reviewing the available witness testimony and video evidence. “My son was brutally beaten to death.” Thomas said that his son was probably off his medication and didn’t understand officers’ commands.

Ron Thomas — himself a retired sheriff’s deputy from Orange County — immediately took up his son’s cause, demanding accountability and raising awareness. At a Fullerton Town Council meeting the month after the killing, he stated, “I just wonder where my son’s rights went as a citizen. Where were his rights? Listen to my son beg those officers, ‘Please, please, God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ And the last words of his life, ‘Dad! Dad!’ I want you to hear that for the rest of your life like I will.”

A report from NBC-4 News on July 27, 2011, stated that all but one of the offending officers were back on patrol at that time. As pressure mounted and national attention grew, the six were placed on paid administrative leave.

Mark Turgeon, who witnessed the struggle, said this in an interview days after the attack:

Well, when I came up here, I saw two cops on top of a homeless guy right here, that I know. They were pretty much beating him up, telling him to ‘stop resisting.’ And then more police came, and they started beating him with a flashlight in the back of his head. And he wasn’t moving around at all, but more came and they started tasering him. It was just a horrible sight.
The police were saying, ‘Quit resisting, quit moving, quit resisting arrest,’ you know, and the guy wasn’t moving. He had his arm in front of him and his head was down already, and he wasn’t moving at all. They just kept going.

They asked me to make a statement. No one else really wanted to. I told them, ‘You guys killed this guy. You murdered him.’ They said: ‘Well we don’t see it that way,’ but I saw the whole thing clear.

It was like a rampage. It was like a feeding frenzy. Like if you were to go watch National Geographic, where the wildebeest gets too close to the water, and the alligator—it was just terrible. It was completely out of line, completely uncalled for, completely too much force. It was brutal.

It didn’t seem like [the police] were angry but it seemed like they had a vengeance. And they were letting it out on him. It was erratic. It was like piranhas.
He wasn’t even moving, but he was yelling for his dad. ‘Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!’ When he went silent, everything stopped finally.


Rare Criminal Charges

To the district attorney’s credit, the decision was made to charge 3 of the officers involved.
Officer Manuel Ramos, 39, was the original person in contact with Thomas and was the officer who put on gloves before administering a beatdown. He was charged with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. He was the first policeman in Orange County history to be charged with murder for an on-duty incident.


Fullerton Police Officers Jay Cicinelli and Manuel Ramos.

Officer Jay Cicinelli, 41,who used the stun gun to jolt Thomas and then used it as weapon to hit him in the face, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and assault under color of authority.

Officer Joseph Wolfe, 37, was indicted by the Orange County grand jury on involuntary manslaughter and excessive-force charges a year after Ramos and Cicinelli were charged. Wolfe appeared on video striking Thomas repeatedly with a baton.

A trial was conducted for Ramos and Cicinelli beginning in December 2013 in front of Superior Court Judge William Froeberg and a jury of twelve.

“The people’s view of this is Kelly Thomas was acting in self defense,” said Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. “We don’t expect our police officers to mistreat people because they don’t like them. Our laws don’t allow police to take a dislike to someone and then administer a punishment. It’s for police to gather the evidence, make the arrest, if necessary.” He added: “It’s one of the major differences between us and a police state.”

The attorneys representing the police made Kelly Thomas sound like a menacing figure who intimidated the police officers. They argued that Thomas was so aggressive that the first two officers had to call for backup so they didn’t “lose the fight.” Defense lawyer Michael Schwartz said that Thomas’s wounds were caused by him “overexerting” himself while compassionate police officers restrained him. Essentially, the Fullerton Police argued that Kelly Thomas killed himself.

Schwarz argued that his gruesome appearance in the hospital was exaggerated and mostly due to superficial wounds, and blamed his death on his heart, saying, “His heart couldn’t take it.” Pathologists, however, confirmed that Kelly’s enlarged heart was not part of the cause of death. There was also no signs of drugs in his body, despite the defense’s attempt to paint Thomas as a drug addict.

Schwartz added, “A tragedy? Yes. A crime? No. Sometimes tragedies happen in this world.”
“The guy wasn’t moving. He had his arm in front of him and his head was down already, and he wasn’t moving at all. They just kept going.”

The prosecution pressed on. “There’s no statement of arrest,”said Rackauckas. “He never tells Kelly Thomas he’s going to be arrested, as opposed to being f***ed up by the defendant’s fists.”
“(Kelly Thomas) was just trying to survive is all he was doing,” argued the district attorney. “Look at the kinds of things he was saying: ‘Please sir,’ ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘I can’t breathe.’”

Fullerton Police Officer Stephen Rubio testified in court on the behalf of the defense. He said that he had trained Cicinelli and Ramos, and that he watched the 33-minute surveillance video of Kelly Thomas’s death. He testified that the only “slight” violation of department policy that he witnessed was the use of profanity.

Prosecutors later brought in John Wilson, a FBI special agent who specialized in training and tactics. “I have problems with everything that happened after Ramos put the gloves on,” he testified, saying that after studying the case for 60 hours he was convinced the force used by police was “clearly” excessive.

Wilson stunned the courtroom when he suggested that the Fullerton Police started the fight and Thomas had a right to end it using any force necessary to protect himself — including lethal force. The comment drew hissing sounds from the department lackeys that filled the courtroom.

Operating As Trained

A pool of Kelly Thomas’s blood. (Source: Joshua Sudock, Orange County Register)

On January 13th, 2014, the jury reached its verdict after two days of deliberation. Ramos and Cicinelli were acquitted of all charges, drawing tears of joy from police officers and tears of anger from the Thomas family and their supporters. In light of this, the District Attorney dropped charges against Officer Joseph Wolfe as well.

“What this means is that all of us need to be very afraid now,” said Ron Thomas. “Its carte blanche for police officers everywhere to kill us, beat us, whatever they want. It has been proven right here today that they’ll get away with it.”

“What this means is that all of us need to be very afraid now. Its carte blanche for police officers everywhere to kill us, beat us, whatever they want.”

“I’m feeling horrible. You know, the injustice is just unbelievable,” he added. “Completely innocent on all counts — they brutally beat him to death, we’ve all seen that, but yet they’re innocent on all counts. Unreal.”
“I guess its legal to go out and kill,” said the victim’s mother, Cathy Thomas. “It breaks my heart. Part of me died that night with Kelly, part of me died that night, part of me died in court. I feel dead inside,” she said. “They got away with murdering my son.”

Defense attorney John Barnett’s comments might be interpreted as sarcastic if they came out of anyone else’s mouth: “These peace officers were doing their jobs. They were operating as they were trained.”
In regard to the burglary complaint, the only property recovered from Thomas was some discarded lettersthat he picked up out of a trash can.
Attorney Garo Mardirossian holds a visual summary of Kelly Thomas’ last words. (Source: KTLA)

Source

I am appalled and saddened that these murders are walking away free men. I don't watch TV news (haven't for many years) but I can bet major networks aren't talking about this one either. I can't wait to see a day where the power is taken away from police.
 
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The real issue here is that a man diagnosed as schizophrenic is living on the streets. If we reformed our mental health programs throughout the US, then police officers would never be placed in a situation where they would have to deal with the mentally ill on the streets. Doctors are far better trained to deal with schizophrenics than police officers are. If our mental health system weren't so severely underfunded, this man likely would have never been on the streets in the first place and this incident would have never happened.

The majority of police officers are responsible public servants who work for the betterment of society. They shouldn't be held responsible for the systemic failures of our mental health system.
 
Though this is extreme and horrifying, not every police officer acts like this. Cops who act like this will be by far the minority. Police are humans, not higher beings or angel-folk, and therefore they can do horrible things sometimes, regardless of their professions. This appears to be one of those cases. However a jury have obviously thought otherwise now. Either some corruption is involved, or there is more to the case than we see in this article. Or people have collectively lost all of their hearts. Who knows.

For the case itself… What was this man doing to resist? From reading the article and viewing the clip it appears that the cops did indeed use excess force on a man who was hardly a threat at all. We were denied the chance to hear what was said at the very beginning of the confrontation on that clip, but if it is true that he was never told he was under arrest, then who can blame him for being confused and crying out for his dad rather than complying with his attackers if their intentions weren’t clear.

It puzzles me that there could have existed the thought that tasing him and harming him this much was needed to keep him calm. He didn't appear aggressive at all at the beginning of that clip. That said, our view is obstructed for a lot of the video (by the cops, mostly), but it doesn’t look as if he is a serious threat. And when you look at the photograph of him above, it is hard to argue that is justifiable. This guy appeared to offer no other resistance than confusion. Again, from what I see. If there is more to it, then that might be the reason.

What is also shocking to me is that they called for back-up, and that the back-up was of the same mindset. But, that noted, we can’t take from that that all cops are like this and we (or you USers, since I’m across Atlas’ pond) should do away with the lot of them. It might be safer to compare and contrast this with the growing amount of nursing home scandals (in the UK, at least), where is seen that some nursing homes have devolved into little pockets of 'carers' who appear to be abusing elderly or disabled patients. Not all of them, however, and that must be stressed. Perhaps like-minded people group together, creating such pockets, or perhaps there is something about group-mentality which can warp a collection of individuals when some of them act in a certain way. I don’t really understand how any little pockets like this could develop, but they do. Maybe with these cops it is the same, but it is not the same with all cops everywhere. If it ever is, then we are all in serious trouble and should fear for our lives. Or perhaps, in this instance, something about this particular moment got very heated, and everybody lost all sense.

Also, I agree that people like this man Kelly Thomas should be better cared for, and they shouldn’t be homeless on the streets, as they are clearly very vulnerable. This whole incident is horrible.
 
The real issue here is that a man diagnosed as schizophrenic is living on the streets. If we reformed our mental health programs throughout the US, then police officers would never be placed in a situation where they would have to deal with the mentally ill on the streets. Doctors are far better trained to deal with schizophrenics than police officers are. If our mental health system weren't so severely underfunded, this man likely would have never been on the streets in the first place and this incident would have never happened.

The majority of police officers are responsible public servants who work for the betterment of society. They shouldn't be held responsible for the systemic failures of our mental health system.

The reason they're police officers is because they're suppose to be able to keep their composure, to be able to calmly react and protect everyone around them, including the person they're approaching that is by law, innocent until proven guilty--which Kelly was.

I'm disheartened to see that you're seriously blaming a mentally ill man just because police "don't know" how to handle them and therefore shouldn't have to. This mentally ill man wasn't doing anything for it to happen in the first place. He was minding his own business. And the fact that you say the "real" issue is anything other than this officer beating an innocent, sick man is both bizarre and appalling. This man was known by a good handful of the police in this area, he was not ever violent with anyone, including during any of the previous police visits... to make matters worse, one of the officers that knew him was the man that initiated the unjust assault against him. At this point, it almost seems like Ramos had a vendetta against him.

Not only did this man know of him, dealt with his non-violent past, but as Mr. Kelly Thomas sat calmly on the sidewalk, officer Ramos did not cuff him as he should have if he committed a crime, but instead put on rubber gloves, and like all bullies, balled his fist and threatened him. At this point, Kelly wasn't doing anything when the cop threatened him. He was calmly sitting down and trying his damnedest to comply with the officer's demands. But after being threatened, Kelly was scared and acted in self-defense and stood, and rightfully so.

He was then beaten so brutally and was so terrified that he defecated on himself shortly before going unconscious, with his last words being cries for help
... But don't worry, these endangered policemen were able to continue to carry out their assault as the man lost consciousness. Because all unconscious, brutally beaten, non-violent "criminals" need to be continuously beaten by a horde of cops. It was for their safety.

Mind you, officer Ramos balled his fist and leaned over Kelly and said "See my fists, they’re going to f*** you up,”. Which was when Kelly got frightened and acted in self-defense, which was after two officers threatened to harm him, which goes outside of police power unless their lives are in harm's way.

Nonetheless, it doesn't matter what the police suspected him of, he is, by law, innocent until proven guilty in the court of law. They wrongfully detained him. They had no reason to ask his name. They had no reason to search his bag, it was only because Kelly allowed them to that they were even able to do so. They wrongfully threatened him. And eventually, they murdered him because of their own incompetence during the situation.

If you watch the entire half an hour video of the officer's conversation with Kelly you'd see that they detained him off of suspicion for a crime he did not commit. When Kelly sat and gave Officer Wolfe permission to search his bag (which Kelly didn't HAVE to do, by the way), they found nothing to link him to the crime they suspected him of--so, as Ramos does in the video, they looked for anything to take him down for just to spare their egos of any bruising. Their excuse, they said he stole mail. They murdered this man and they justify it because they claim he stole mail--which wasn't the crime they had originally illegally detained him for in the first place.


Bottom line, police have no right to use excessive, violent force against anyone unless their lives are endangered, which theirs were not.

The police should and will be held responsible for their actions. It's ridiculous that you are putting this all on Mr. Thomas. It's disrespectful and completely inconsiderate to this man and to his family and also to the many people that have also been on the same side of the unjust police system.

You are practically saying that because some police don't know how to handle certain people those people shouldn't go out or live? What if this was a preteen throwing a tantrum? Should a cop be able to use this kind of force on a teenager just because that cop "doesn't know" how to handle them?

The people shouldn't live around the cops. The cops work around and FOR us. That's what they're suppose to do. That is what they are paid for. They are not taxpayer paid to protect themselves with unnecessary, excessive and violent force against an unarmed citizen because they wrongfully suspect him of a crime.

That is why they're hired. Because they're suppose to be able to handle themselves, keep all parties involved as calm as possible, but most importantly, keep everyone safe.

Someone should have been caring for him, though. He should not have been on the street to begin with. He should have had someone that loved him caring for him. Why? Because people can't be trusted, especially the mob-mentality driven police force.

However, what you're saying is victim-blaming. Blaming the victim is wrong in any situation, no matter their mental health. It's pretty god damn sad that the person with a mental illness is expected to have a sounder mind than five or six cops.

"if our mental health system weren't so severely underfunded, this man likely would have never been on the streets in the first place and this incident would have never happened."

Sounds a lot like; "Well, if you didn't wear that miniskirt you wouldn't have gotten raped!" to me. :/

Victim-blaming is always wrong, no matter the circumstances.

I'm disappointed that when hearing of something so tragic and so unjust as this, this is all you have to say. :/

Another question to all the viewers in this thread;

Do you think that the citizens should have had a right to defend Kelly before he was eventually murdered? Keep in mind multiple eyewitnesses saw Kelly flat on his belly with his hands forward (just like the cops asked) but the horde continued to taze and beat him, the majority of the hits landing on his skull, including the back of his skull.


I'm not going to lie, I probably won't come back to this thread. The fact that this happens all the time physically makes me sick.
 
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