A white police officer on trial in Minneapolis for killing a young African-American man last April said in a statement today that a routine traffic accident had turned into “chaos” in minutes.
Kim Potter, 49, is charged with negligent homicide. She claims that she fired her service revolver, thinking it was a teaser gun, to immobilize 20-year-old Dode Wright, who was resisting his arrest in Brooklyn Center, on the outskirts of that city.
“We were trying to stop him from leaving and then there was chaos. “I remember shouting ‘teaser, teaser, teaser’ (…) and my colleague told me I shot him,” Potter said, bursting into tears. He assured that he does not remember exactly what happened next. “An ambulance came for me, I do not know why, then I was at the police station,” he said.
On April 11, a police officer and a colleague were patrolling when they decided to check the driver of a vehicle that had committed a minor traffic violation. When they found out that a warrant was pending against him, they tried to arrest him.
The police officer described a “potentially dangerous” situation.
“Sometimes there are guns in the car, people are not cooperative, we do not know who we are controlling,” he explained.
The young man, who was not carrying a weapon, did not allow him to be handcuffed and pressed the accelerator to leave. Potter then pulled out her gun, thinking it was the teaser. In a video from the scene, he is heard shouting “teaser” several times, before shooting Wright and fatally injuring him.
The case came as a shock to Minneapolis during the trial of Derek Sowin, the police officer who killed African-American George Floyd in May 2020. , until Potter was arrested and the spirits calmed down.
Her lawyer, Paul Eng, claims that it was a human error, combined with the stress he had paid her while trying to protect her colleague. Prosecutor Erin Eldridge, however, speaks of misuse of the weapon and negligence on the part of the police officer, who has 26 years of experience in the body.
Ben Crump, the Wright family’s lawyer, said after Potter’s testimony that the young man’s death could have been avoided. “The argument that she mistaken her gun for a teaser is incomprehensible,” she said.
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