Police say they saw an object in Stephan Clark’s hand before firing 20 bullets that killed him in his own yard Sunday night in Sacramento, with the disturbing moment made public through body camera footage released Wednesday night.
The two officers were responding to a 911 call about a man breaking vehicle windows.
Body camera video released by the Sacramento Police Department depicts a frantic foot pursuit through darkened streets pierced by white slivers of police flashlight. The officers spot Clark approaching a house.
“Show me your hands. Stop! Stop!” He runs. The two officers round the corner of the house and find Clark under a covered patio.
An infrared camera on an overhead helicopter briefly loses the sightline of Clark at this moment.
“Show me your hands! Gun!” an officer shouts, and ducks back behind the wall in a fraction of a second.
The helicopter footage shows one of the officers appearing to grab his partner to pull him to cover.
Clark, who is black, is shown taking a step or two toward the officers. Behind the wall, an officer issues another command. “Show me your hands!” And then instantly: “Gun, gun, gun!”
Both officers engaged in rapid fire. Sparks from the impact of the bullets light up the helicopter’s infrared camera in sharp white pops.
The sequence, from first glimpse of Clark on the patio to the first gunshot, is about six seconds. The officers never identify themselves as police. Clark died at the scene.
“He was at the wrong place at the wrong time in his own back yard?” his grandmother, Sequita Thompson, told the Sacramento Bee. “C’mon now, they didn’t have to do that.”
Police said the man they believed was breaking windows was the same man they killed in a hail of gunfire, identified as a man over six feet tall, the Sacramento Police Department said Monday.
Authorities have yet to identify Clark as the suspect or victim, but Thompson and family members identified him to media using variations of his name, Stephon and Stephan.
Thompson disputes the police’s version of events. Her grandson was short, she said in a video produced by the Bee. She believes another suspect was smashing windows, but Clark was in her back yard at the wrong time.
The doorbell is broken, and family members tap on the back window for someone to open the garage door, the family told the newspaper. Clark was staying at his grandmother’s at the time.
Gunfire startled her that night.
“The only thing that I heard was pow, pow, pow, pow, and I got to the ground,” she said in the video. She said she began to suspect the police description of a dead person in her yard was a member of the family.
“I told the officers, ‘You guys are murderers. Murderers,’ ” Thompson cried out in the video. “You took him away from his kids.” He had two young sons, Cairo and Aiden, the family said, and a fiancee, Salena Manni, the Associated Press reported.
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Thompson did not return a request for comment.
The narrative of the Sunday night shooting released by authorities tells a short, grim story.
The helicopter observed a suspect picking up a “toolbar” and breaking a window to a house after 9 p.m Sunday night. The Bee reported it was the sliding glass door belonging to a neighbor. The suspect then ran and looked into a car, authorities said.
Police in the helicopter guided police on the ground to the front yard of Thompson’s house as Clark was coming from the back. They met in the middle.
How many times Clark was struck is unknown, pending the investigation. The officers are on paid administrative leave as it unfolds, authorities said.
Sacramento police Detective Eddie Macauley did not immediately know Wednesday what model of weapon the police used, or if the 10 rounds they each fired was the entire capacity of their magazines.
The police said Monday that five minutes passed before responding officers arrived to cuff Clark and render first aid.
That timeline is not precise, according to the footage. Five minutes and 16 seconds pass between the radio call of shots fired and when officers snap on the cuffs. Several more seconds pass before someone on scene begins chest compressions.
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A single, broad sentence of department guidance on providing medical attention to suspects reads: “Officers shall provide first aid to injured parties if it can be done safely.”
Some factors may affect how and if police render aid to someone they shoot, such as if they are resisting or if police think a weapon is present, Macauley told The Washington Post.
The officers do not appear to be be fearful of an attack once Clark was down. He wasn’t moving, an officer notes. One officer, in no clear urgency to replenish his ammunition, waits a minute and a half before he reloads.
“Sir, can you move?” an arriving officer calls into the night at Clark minutes after the shooting, telling him they cannot help unless they know he does not have a weapon.
An analysis by The Post found that 987 people were killed by police last year — 68 of them unarmed. Of those, 30 were white, 20 were black and 13 were Hispanic, showing an overrepresentation of African Americans among the total population. Five of the remaining fatalities were unknown or other.
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg in a statement Wednesday night offered his condolences to Clark’s family and said he was “heartbroken” for the city.
He also said that he reviewed the videos carefully and, “based on the videos alone, I cannot second-guess the split-second decisions of our officers and I’m not going to do that.”
“The questions raised by the community and council members are appropriate and must be answered during the investigation,” Steinberg wrote.
Police allowed Clark’s family to review the video before it was publicly released.
“As soon as they did the command, they started shooting. They said ‘Put your hands up, gun’ and then they just let loose on my nephew,” said Clark’s aunt Saquois Durham, the Bee reported.
[ The Post’s 2018 database of officer-involved killings ]
Local pastor and community activist Les Simmons also viewed the video. “Even if he did what they say was done, at the end of the day it does not justify his life being taken,” he said, according to the Bee.
Simmons called into question what was left off the released video, particularly at the end.
Before the video concludes, the two officers walk to the street, nearly seven minutes after the shooting.
Shimmering red and blue lights silhouette an approaching group of officers. Their faces are blurred.
“Hey mute?” an officer says. The audio goes silent, and shortly after, the videos end.
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