Cop feared life because of Philando Castile’s ‘audacity’ to smoke weed in front of child

The officer who fatally shot Philando Castile said that it was the smell of marijuana that made him fear for his life.

Jun 21, 2017

The officer who fatally shot Philando Castile said that it was the smell of marijuana that made him fear for his life.

Former Officer Jeronimo Yanez said on the day after the shooting that he was “hit with a odor of burning marijuana” when he pulled over Castile, his girlfriend, and his then-four-year-old daughter.

“I thought, I was gonna die and I thought if he’s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me,” Yanez told the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

–Dash cam footage in Philando Castile shooting case release–

Yanez, who had claimed that Castile’s “wide-set nose” matched a description of an armed robbery suspect, said that the smell combined with the sight of the firearm caused him to fear for his life.

“Being that … the inside of the vehicle smelled like marijuana um I didn’t know if he was keeping it on him for protection, for, from a, a drug dealer or anything like that,” he said.

A transcript of the interview was released on Tuesday along with dash cam footage of the moment Yanez fired into Castile’s car seven times, killing him.