Questions loom after teen’s death BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A day after police fatally shot Jaime Gonzalez, 15, an eighth-grader who was brandishing a realistic-looking pellet gun in his middle school hallway, his anguished parents pleaded for answers, demanding to
Questions loom after teen’s death
BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A day after police fatally shot Jaime Gonzalez, 15, an eighth-grader who was brandishing a realistic-looking pellet gun in his middle school hallway, his anguished parents pleaded for answers, demanding to know why police didn’t try a Taser or beanbag gun before deadly force.
Authorities released a 911 recording from Cummings Middle School.
The assistant principal on the phone first says there’s a student in the hall with a gun, then reports that he is drawing the weapon and finally that he is running down the hall.
On the recording, police can be heard yelling: “Put the gun down! Put it on the floor!” In the background, someone else yells, “He’s saying that he is willing to die.”
Before police arrived, school administrators had urged Jaime to give up the gun. When officers got to the school, the boy was waiting for them, Rodriguez said.
Moments before he was killed, Jaime began to run down a hallway. Police fired down the hallway — a distance that made a stun gun or other methods impractical, Brownsville interim Police Chief Orlando Rodriguez said.
1 officer killed, 5 hurt in shootout
OGDEN, Utah (AP) — Search warrant in hand, a team of bulletproof vest-wearing officers rapped on the door of a small, red-brick Utah house, identifying themselves as police.
When no one responded, authorities say, the officers burst inside. That’s when the gunfire erupted.
When it was over Wednesday night, a 7-year veteran officer was dead and five of his colleagues were wounded, some critically.
The suspect, an Army veteran whose estranged father said suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and may have been self-medicating with marijuana, was injured.
Now, as the city tries to grapple with the outburst of violence and the loss of one of its officers, investigators are trying to determine how the raid as part of a drug investigation could have gone so terribly wrong.
“It’s a very, very sad day,” an emotional Ogden Police Chief Wayne Tarwater said Thursday.
Animal euthanasia unpopular
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Seven in 10 pet owners say they believe animal shelters should be allowed to euthanize animals only when they are too sick to be treated or too aggressive to be adopted.
Only a quarter of the people who took part in a recent AP-Petside.com poll said animal shelters should sometimes be allowed to put animals down as a population control measure.
Gisela Aguila, 51, of Miramar, Fla., believes shelter animals should only be euthanized when there is no chance they’ll be adopted — for example, if they are extremely ill or aggressive.
“I don’t think shelters should be euthanizing animals to control the population,” she said.
She’d like to see an end to shelters destroying animals when they run out of room, saying, “We are way too civilized of a society to allow this.”
But Leslie Surprenant, 53, of Saugerties, N.Y., believes shelters should be allowed to control populations. She says no-kill shelters that only accept animals with good prospects for adoption or that turn away animals once the shelter reaches capacity do not solve the problem.
“That doesn’t truly mean no-kill shelters. It means there are more animals out on the streets being hit by cars and starving and living in Dumpsters,” said Surprenant, who has two dogs and a cat. “It does not mean the general population is lower; it just means that they’ve opted not to kill.”
