Killed by Cops: Police Shootings Run Rampant

This article is part of a series from ColorLines and The Chicago Reporter. In a joint national investigation, the publications found that Blacks are overrepresented and Latinos are a rising number of those fatally shot by police.

It was hot and quiet in Mesa, Arizona, as a crowd gathered outside the headquarters of the police department on Aug. 25, 2007. On this day in 2003, the parents of 15-year-old Mario Madrigal Jr. called the police in a panic because their oldest son was threatening to kill himself with a kitchen knife. Within hours, they found themselves watching helplessly as Mario Jr. was shot and killed by police officers, who say he had threatened them with the knife.

Four years later, about 100 people, most of them wearing black T-shirts, joined the family in insisting that Mario was a threat to no one but himself that night and that he was killed by a police force ill-equipped to engage with mental-health crises and Mesa's growing Latino community. "We need changes in how officers approach us Hispanics," Mario Madrigal Sr. said. "They should be much more educated [in] knowing our culture...and understand that we are human beings."

No one from the Mesa Police Department emerged to face the crowd. The crowd was literally speaking to a brick wall as they chanted "justice for Mario" and cheered Mario Sr.'s insistent statement, "The case is not closed." Although the Mesa PD's internal investigation cleared the officers who shot Mario Jr. of any wrongdoing, the family is involved in an independent investigation, and a federal district court judge has set a date in September 2008 for the Madrigals' civil case to be brought before a jury. The family hopes they will be more responsive than local authorities have been.

The Madrigals are hardly the only family in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area that feels like they're talking to a brick wall as they seek justice in the police killing of a loved one.

In March 2006, Malissia Clinton's younger brother, James Deon Lennox, 35, was shot by a police officer outside his apartment in Mesa. According to the story Clinton and her mother have pieced together from witnesses' accounts, Lennox and his girlfriend had returned home late after a night out and began arguing about where to park the car. Within minutes, a police officer arrived. Then two more officers appeared. For reasons none of the witnesses can be sure of, Lennox and one of the officers got into a physical fight. Then, Officer David Kohler shot Lennox twice -- once in the shoulder, once in the chest -- and James Deon Lennox died.

Mesa police spokesmen say Kohler felt his life was threatened -- that Lennox had already hit him with a lawn chair and that he fired his gun when Lennox picked up another one. Neighbors say the chairs in question were cheap, flimsy ones-not life-threatening -- and the autopsy report by the county medical examiner says that both shots came from a distance. The city of Mesa denied a claim of wrongdoing filed by Lennox's family, and the county attorney's office has not filed criminal charges against Kohler. An internal police investigation into the shooting is still under way.

According to Lennox's family, two witnesses have said that one of the officers called him a "nigger" the night he was killed. Malissia Clinton, an attorney in California, thinks her brother was "just tired of playing by rules that are unfair." He'd been arguing with his girlfriend, he'd had a little bit to drink, it was late and suddenly there were police officers on the scene.

"As a Black man," Clinton said, "you know what you are supposed to do and what you're not supposed to do with the police. There are rules that are kinda unspoken, but everybody understands that you could lose your life, so you need to really be careful. That's a given -- my husband knows it, Barack Obama knows it...everybody knows that." So what happened that night? "I just think that he was tired, he decided that this guy was not gonna put his hands on him -- if he wanted to talk to him like a man, that was fine, but if he wanted to play physical at all, he was just not gonna stand for it. And so, he decided to take a stand, and I think that that's why he lost his life."