The parents of a 31-year-old man shot and killed by police in Hilo on June 18 have filed a lawsuit against the county and held an online press conference Wednesday to talk about their son, Daniel Buckingham.
Jim Bickerton, a Honolulu attorney representing Mary and Marty Buckingham, both physicians from Ann Arbor, Mich., said the police “have not been very forthcoming with the family.”
“It really troubles us, and we see this frequently,” Bickerton said. “The people who should really be told what happened and have things explained to them and be given information are the immediate relatives. Especially in a situation like this, where you have no prior history of any violent act.”
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Hilo Circuit Court, seeks monetary damages for alleged negligence by officers who responded to a residential alarm at a home in the 1800 block of Kilauea Avenue in Hilo.
Police said the three officers on scene announced their presence while going room-by-room in the house. When officers entered the bedroom Daniel Buckingham was in, he attacked one of the officers with a knife, injuring the officer’s forearm, according to police.
A pair of body camera videos released by police show no such announcement as the officers entered the bedroom. Some action occurred that wasn’t caught clearly by the cameras, and what sounded like 13 gunshots were fired in rapid succession.
“You can hear the officers speaking in very quiet and hushed tones to each other. This is a classic thing that we’re seeing all the time, and it leads to this type of tragedy, very frequently,” Bickerton said. “Which is, that the police get excited to think that they can catch someone — and they want to sneak up on them. This happened in Honolulu recently in the (Lindani) Myeni case, and it seems to have happened to Dan Buckingham. They were quietly approaching that room and whispering to each other, no announcement of ‘police.’ He could almost certainly hear someone outside, but they weren’t saying who they were.
“And in his state, if he were feeling paranoid or anxious — and as we have heard, he had been threatened by some other people in the community recently — if that’s the case, he doesn’t know who’s about to burst through that door.
“And that is just bad police work. They had the house surrounded.”
Two of the three officers discharged their firearms: the injured officer, a 12-year veteran who was treated and released at Hilo Medical Center, and an officer who had been on the force for just over a year.
An autopsy found Buckingham died of “multiple gunshot wounds to his upper body with several shots being fatal,” according to a police statement.
Mary Buckingham, a geriatric psychiatrist, said she was on a plane en route to Hilo at her son’s request when he was killed. She said the tone of text messages from her son seemed “concerned” and “a little bit anxious.”
“I was coming not in concern that if I didn’t come, he was going to die, but in concern that he was … willing to reunite after we hadn’t been together in several years,” she said.
She said she called local police for a “wellness check” on her son earlier in the week of the shooting, and was “relieved” when she found he had been arrested for a home break-in in Puna, where food and a pair of shoes were taken.
“I thought, ‘Great. Someone’s going to lay eyes on him and see what’s going on. Is he sick? Does he need help?’” Mary Buckingham said. “No one who saw him ever thought he was a danger to himself or anyone else, or had concern enough to take him to the hospital.
“… But prior to that … he had no criminal history, no history of violence, he was never aggressive or violent — and he didn’t even own a knife.”
Daniel Buckingham had been freed on court-supervised release without posting monetary bail after the June 15 burglary.
The Buckinghams said their son had received substance abuse treatment for marijuana as a senior in high school and had been hospitalized during early adulthood for use of “psychogenic substances.”
According to Mary Buckingham, her son moved around the country a great deal as an adult.
“As he traveled, he really felt that that supported his sobriety. And he traveled on his own, because once he’d join up with people, very often they would be using substances, and he tried not to,” she said.
Bickerton said that even if Daniel Buckingham had a knife, that didn’t justify the police response.
“If you measure the time, as we’ve done, that the force was applied to break the door open … up until the first shot is fired, it’s literally three seconds,” he said. “So who was lunging at who? It’s very hard to accept the police version that he lunged at them. He’s in the room. They’re outside the room, coming in with guns drawn. And he doesn’t know who they are because they haven’t said who’s coming in. He sees weapons coming in. If he reaches with the only weapon he has at hand or does something like that, that doesn’t alter the basic fact that the police mishandled the entry into that room.
“This is exactly the type of thing they have to be prepared for — and the answer isn’t 13 bullets.”
Mary Buckingham said police are “trying to paint this distorted narrative” that her son was “a bad actor who was aggressive and tried to hurt them, and they had no choice but to shoot him.”
“His last mention on Earth is that he tried to kill a cop, and they had to kill him,” she said. “… We want to shine a light on the truth and find out what really happened, even if it’s hard for us to hear.”
Police Chief Paul Ferreira said investigations into the shooting by both the Hilo Criminal Investigations Section and the Office of Professional Standards — the department’s internal affairs unit — are still being conducted.
He added he was aware of the lawsuit, but hadn’t seen it and couldn’t comment.
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
