The video of the fatal shooting of 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis has been released as of Wednesday, showing the moments when deputy marshals fired 18 times into the car after a police car chase.
The video shows Mardis’ father slumped over and bleeding before one of the officers states, “There’s a juvenile.”
“I never saw a kid in the car, man,” Lieutenant Stafford, who has been accused of firing 14 of the 18 shots, is heard saying. “I never saw a kid, bro.”
In the aftermath of the shooting, one of the officers appears to vomit over what has happened, according to audio.
The November 3 shooting case raised questions about the tactics and effectiveness of high-speed chases, but it is also an interesting case because of the racial narrative: Mardis was white, and as many have pointed out, there was little to no national attention concerning his death.
“If the victim is white, there just doesn’t seem to be an interest,” Eric S. Bland, a lawyer for the family of Zachary Hammond, a white teenager who was shot dead by a white police officer in South Carolina in 2015, said Thursday.
However, David A. Harris, a professor and expert in police accountability at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, said that there were several factors contributing to the lack of media coverage, including the fact that there is more of a perception that the police were after Mardis’ father, not specifically gunning for the young man, as has seemed to be the case in police brutality cases involving young African-Americans, saying of Mardis’ father: “He had had a role in creating this risk that a lot of people would say, ‘This is kind of on him.’”
Harris added that while there are cases of police brutality involving white victims, the fact is that it is African-Americans who face violence in disproportionate numbers. “They are disproportionately likely to attract police attention, and when they do, they are more likely to have force used on them. And so it is just way more likely that something horrible is going to go wrong,” he explained.
Despite the racial implications involved, one thing is clear from watching the footage: that night, a 6-year-old child lost his life because of the actions of police officers.
The two officers involved in the shooting of Jeremy Mardis were charged with second-degree murder, with Lieutenant Stafford’s trial set for November and Officer Norris Greenhouse Jr.’s for March.