White woman yells “Shoot me n*****!” to Black cop while brandishing scissors and is fatally shot by police
The District Attorney has classified the shooring as justifiable homicide.
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A white woman in Louisiana who brandished scissors and called a Black police officer the n-word, was shot and killed after she refused to drop the shears.
On Oct. 25 at 5:45 a.m., Officer Patrick Edmonds Jr. responded to a report that there was a “disorderly person” at the La Quinta Inn in Bossier City, Louisiana. According to The Sun, this is when he encountered an erratic acting Shannon Rupert talking on the telephone in the hotel lobby area.
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“Ma’am, put those scissors down,” Edmonds repeatedly told Rupert, according to The Sun. The officer’s bodycam recorded Rupert yelling a racial slur at Edmonds. And she never dropped the scissors.
“You’re gonna have to shoot me, n—-,” Rupert can be heard saying in the audio from the bodycam.
According to The Sun, Rupert approached the front desk lobby to hang up the phone while still holding the scissors, and that is when the officer pulled his gun out and flashed a light into her face.
“Hey, if you come over here, I will kill you!” Officer Edmonds Jr. warns her, according to The Sun.
Rupert, with scissors in hand, walked toward Edmonds and he fired twice. The officer then called for help for the woman, as she lay groaning on the ground.
Since the incident, Edmonds has been on administrative leave. An investigation conducted by the Bossier City Police Department and a separate review by the District Attorney’s Office have called the shooting “justified.”
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“No crime was committed by the officer as his actions constituted justifiable homicide,” the district attorney wrote in a letter on the incident, adding that Edmonds had a “reasonable belief that he was in imminent danger of losing his life.”
Rupert’s family is now left to grieve her loss.
Her cousin, Melinda Peterson, told KSLA-TV that Rupert has battled drug addiction.
“I knew she had been into drugs really bad. I tried helping her,” Peterson told the news station. “I tried talking to her to see if maybe we could get her some help, a recourse. Getting her into rehab or anything like that. She was just out of it.”
The Internal Affairs Division, per police department policy, is now investigating the incident to see if any department polices were violated.
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