August 18, 2016 

By Charlene Muhammad 

Contributing Writer

The family of a mentally disabled Black man unjustly accused of carjacking and fatally shot by L.A. County Sheriff Deputies in Compton held his funeral services in Inglewood on Aug. 16. 

 

Donnell Thompson Jr.’s family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit, and plans to file a federal lawsuit in September, according to reports.

 

His family said police treated him worse than an animal in their rush to judgement.  They appealed to L.A. County Supervisors during the body’s Aug. 9 to hold the Sheriffs Department accountable. 

 

Police killed an innocent man, Thompson’s family lamented in a press conference afterward.

 

“I’m tired of hurting.  I’m tired of crying,” said Lamar Avila, Thompson’s cousin.  “I’m emotional. It affects me at work,” he said, as he pled for the truth about what activists dubbed an unjustified, merciless killing on July 28.

 

Police concluded Thompson was one of two suspects in an armed carjacking in L.A. the night before.  After deputies spotted the car in Compton, a chase ensued.  Deputies alleged they were fired on, and when the car crashed, suspects fled into a neighborhood. 

 

Police in armored vehicles and paramilitary gear took to residential streets and saw Thompson laying down in a neighbor’s yard after being alerted by a 911 call. 

 

According to police, one of the 27-year-old’s hands was hidden under his body.  They first hit him with rubber bullets, then a deputy fired after he supposedly charged them.

 

Activists argued police shot Thompson after their flash bang devices and rubber bullets caused him to run.

 

“Bo Pete’s personality is introverted, quiet, shy, almost easily intimidated, and a little bit on the withdrawn side.  I think him even hearing the sounds of cars and helicopters probably frightened him,” said Dawn Modkins, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Long Beach.

 

She believes the Sheriffs Department’s approach of military tanks, bright lights, sirens and whatever else they may have used terrified Thompson and caused him to freeze up.  That is his coping mechanism, his go to place, according to the activist.

 

She said witnesses have indicated police made no command until after they hit Thompson with a flash bang grenade, which frightened him even more. 

 

“Then he finally does proceed to stand, and according to witnesses, he’s looking a little dazed, confused, just blasted with rubber bullets, maybe couldn’t hear with that loud grenade they let off.  They said he was kind of stumbling and proceeded to walk away, and then they killed him,” Modkins told the Sentinel.

 

Judged, tried and executed on the spot without question, and Thompson was completely innocent.  According to the Sheriffs Department, deputies  took Robert Alexander into custody for the crime after a house-to-house search without incident.

 

Thompson, they shot first and sought questions about later.

 

He was soft-spoken, kind and gentle, and was a threat to no one, his family said.

 

“I’m hurt.  I wonder why they had to take someone very special to me,” said Antoinette Brown, Thompson’s sister.  “Black Lives Matter.  I just want justice for my baby brother,” Brown stated.

 

Captain Steven Katz of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau admitted their deadly error.

 

“We have no physical evidence that connects Mr. Thompson to the carjacked vehicle or to any assault by gunfire on our deputies,” Katz revealed in an August 8 press conference.

 

For weeks Thompson’s family practically pleaded for answers as to why police shot their beloved.  Katz said the Sheriffs Department wanted to provide answers to Thompson’s family and an investigation was underway.

 

“We want what we want … What's the hesitation?  What’s the hesitation?  What is there to cover?  What is there to cover?  Why does it have to be this drastic,” Avila questioned.

 

Thompson’s family has said the Sheriffs Department was not being forthright about the facts.  What they had been hearing was not true, Avila said.

 

According to reports, their lawyer, Brian Dunn of the Cochran Firm, has questioned how one of two of the shots were fired into Thompson’s upper back, though police said he charged them.

 

It should not have taken so long for police to clear Thompson’s name,

 

“Around the world, Black people are demonized.  We’re already judged by law enforcement before they know who we are,” she said.  “He by then was judged, criminalized, devalued before they even knew who he was, calling him a carjacker, a thief, a suspect,” she said. 

 

Katz and Sheriff Department press releases detailed steps of its investigation, methods used and persons or entities investigated to draw its conclusion Thompson was innocent.

 

Investigators used gunshot residue testing, DNA, interviews with witnesses,  deputies, and family members, latent fingerprints, and a special session of the Department’s Critical Incident Review Committee was also held.

 

Modkins attributed that to the Thompson family’s unity, legal and political organization, and their quickness in applying pressure on the Sheriffs Department in many ways. 

 

They forced them to have to admit they were wrong in devaluing and killing him, she noted.

 

“They do that publicly and immediately in the media as soon as they commit these acts, try to win their case in the media to save themselves every time, but what’s interesting about their admission is this evidences how they drag out other cases,” she said. 

 

Modkins added, “They did in a week what they claim usually takes a year.  We’re going to expect a similar time frame if this ever happens again.”

 

Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter Long Beach has issued an invoice to L.A. County Sheriff Jim McDonnell for Thompson’s funeral service expenses. 

 

The bill is to really shed light on the need for reparations law enforcement owes to the families for harm caused by the state Modkins explained.

 

However, reparation goes beyond paying for funeral services, she said.  It is about their families, children, and communities and law enforcement’s guilt of causing trauma and dehumanization.

 

“They left his body lying in the street naked and uncovered until in the dark evening … What message are they trying to send to our community when they do that,” Modkins questioned.

 

The bill totaling $15,000, was levied August 9 for the “wrongful death of Donnell ‘Bo Pete’ Thompson, and cited the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department now admission:  “We have determined that there is no evidence that Mr. Thompson was in  the carjacked vehicle, nor that he was involved in the assault on the deputies.”

August 11, 2016 

By JIM SALTER 

Associated Press

 

Gunfire broke out during a demonstration in Ferguson, Miss­ouri, on the second anniversary of Michael Brown's death, disrupting what had been a peaceful gathering Tuesday night but apparently wounding no one.

 

Witnesses told an Associated Press reporter that a car sped through a group of protesters who were blocking a street during the demonstration marking two years since the unarmed black 18-year-old’s fatal shooting by a white police officer. They said the car struck a young man so hard that he flew into the air. As the car drove away, shots were fired, they said.

 

“A lady came down and hit a protester — knocked the shoes off his feet,” said Sharon Cowan, who was at the scene. “Hit him, and he rolled and he bounced.”

 

The man appeared to be badly injured and was put into a private car to be taken to a hospital, she said.

 

Heather De Mian, who frequently livestreams protests in the St. Louis area, said she screamed when the man was hit.

 

“Then when the bullets flew, I started screaming some more,” she said.

 

Police responded to reports of gunfire but had found no evidence that anyone had been struck, said Ferguson spokesman Jeff Small, who declined to speculate about why the shots were fired.

 

By around 10 p.m., the protesters had disbanded.

 

Earlier in the day, a few hundred people gathered for a memorial service and moment of silence along Canfield Drive at the spot where Brown was fatally shot by officer Darren Wilson after a confrontation on Aug. 9, 2014.

 

A state grand jury declined to press charges against Wilson, and the U.S. Justice Department later cleared him, concluding that he had acted in self-defense. He resigned in November 2014.

 

Brown’s death led to months of sometimes-violent protests in Ferguson. It was also was a catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement, which rebukes police treatment of minorities and has grown following several other killings of black men and boys by police, such as Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

 

Brown’s father, also named Michael Brown, said in a brief speech during the memorial service that the anniversary was a sad day for him and his family, and for the world, too.

 

“My son built families up, opened the eyes of the world and let them know this ain’t right,” he said. “This color is not a disease. This color is beautiful. Black is beautiful.”

 

The 2014 shooting also led to a Justice Department investigation that found patterns of racial bias in Ferguson’s police and municipal court system. The federal agency and the city agreed this year to make sweeping changes.

 

This month, more than 60 organizations affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement released a list of six demands and 40 recommendations for how to achieve policing and criminal justice reforms.

 

Brandy Shields, 19, went to school with Brown and remembered him as a kid who “never got into trouble.” Shields comforted a little girl who was crying at the service.

 

“It’ll get better,” Shields told the child. “We have to make it better, but it’ll get better.”

 

August 11, 2016 

By Terri Vermeulen Keith 

City News Service 

The man dubbed the “Grim Sleeper” serial killer was sentenced to death this week for the killings of nine women and a teenage girl, primarily in the South Los Angeles area.

 

Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 63, was convicted May 5 of 10 counts of first- degree murder for the killings of nine women and a 15-year-old girl between 1985 and 2007. In June, jurors recommended that Franklin receive the death penalty.

 

Before handing down the sentence, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy rejected a motion for a new trial for Franklin, and also rejected a motion to reduce the jury’s recommendation of death to life in prison without parole.

 

Kennedy told victims’ relatives and friends in the courtroom that the sentencing likely wouldn’t give them “closure.”

 

“Your loved one, your daughter, your sister, your mother, your friend is still gone,” she said. “Hopefully there is some measure of justice you’ll feel, but closure isn't what this trial was about.”

 

The judge noted that “there was nothing really presented in mitigation by the defense,” and the aggravating circumstances in the case warranted the death penalty.

 

Franklin showed little reaction during the hearing, staring straight ahead as victims’ relatives made statements to the court.

 

In addition to the murders, jurors also found Franklin guilty of the attempted murder of Enietra Washington, who survived being shot in the chest and pushed out of a moving vehicle in November 1988.

 

During the penalty phase of the trial, the prosecution presented evidence that it contends links Franklin to four other killings for which he was not charged.

 

In a court filing this week, Franklin's attorneys argued that presenting such evidence unfairly pushed jurors toward recommending death, saying that any “reasonable juror would feel sympathy” for the victims’ family members “with only one course of action available to the jury to acknowledge their pain.”

 

“That was a finding that the death penalty was the proper sentence,” the attorneys said in their filing.

 

In their court filing, Deputy District Attorneys Beth Silverman and Marguerite Rizzo countered that “a death sentence is clearly warranted based on the evidence and the law.”

 

“The defendant is a serial killer who intentionally targeted victims who were easy to exploit,” the prosecutors wrote. “The staggering number of murders in this case and the pattern displayed across these violent crimes highlight the defendant's goal-directed behavior. He routinely manipulated others to achieve his goal: doing evil.”

 

The prosecutors — who wrote that Franklin has shown “absolutely no remorse” — called him “completely irredeemable” and a “psychopathic, sadistic serial killer who takes joy in inflicting pain on women and killing them.”

 

The killings for which Franklin was convicted occurred between 1985 and 1988 and 2002 and 2007. The assailant, who was arrested in July 2010, was dubbed the “Grim Sleeper” because of what was believed to be a 13-year break in the murders. The uncharged killings occurred in 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2005.

 

Franklin was convicted of killing:

 

— Debra Jackson, a 29-year-old mother of two who was found dead from three gunshot wounds to the chest in an alley in South Los Angeles on Aug. 10, 1985;

 

— Henrietta Wright, a 34-year-old mother of five who was shot twice in the chest and found in an alley with a cloth gag stuffed in her mouth in South Los Angeles on Aug. 12, 1986;

 

— Barbara Ware, 23, shot once in the chest and found under a pile of debris and garbage in an alley in South Los Angeles on Jan. 10, 1987;

 

— Bernita Sparks, 26, shot once in the chest and found in a trash bin with her shirt and pants unbuttoned in Los Angeles on April 16, 1987;

 

— Mary Lowe, 26, shot once in the chest and found in an alley with her pants unzipped behind a large shrub in South Los Angeles on Nov. 1, 1987;

 

— Lachrica Jefferson, 22, found dead from two gunshot wounds to the chest — with a napkin over her face with the handwritten word “AIDS” on it — in an alley in South Los Angeles on Jan. 30, 1988;

 

— Alicia Alexander, 18, killed by a gunshot wound to the chest and found naked under a blue foam mattress in an alley in South Los Angeles on Sept. 11, 1988;

 

— Princess Berthomieux, 15, strangled and discovered naked and hidden in shrubbery in an alley in Inglewood on March 9, 2002;

 

— Valerie McCorvey, the 35-year-old mother of one, strangled and found dead with her clothes pulled down at the entrance to a locked alley in South Los Angeles on July 11, 2003; and

 

— Janecia Peters, 25, shot in the back and found naked inside a sealed plastic trash bag in a trash bin in an alley in South Los Angeles on Jan. 1, 2007.

 

Outside court after jurors recommended that Franklin be sentenced to death, the father of one of the victims said, “We got what we came to get.”

 

“We got a just verdict,” said Alicia Alexander’s father, Porter Alexander Jr., who was a fixture during the court proceedings. “It was a long time coming, but all I asked for was the good lord to give me strength enough to make it every day.”

 

When asked if Franklin was Los Angeles’ most prolific killer, Silverman told reporters, “I don’t know. He’s certainly one of them.”

 

Franklin’s lead attorney, Seymour Amster, said after the verdict that “millions of dollars will be spent on appeals because we have no choice but to do that,” telling reporters that the money could have gone to South Los Angeles schools.

 

He said the defense did not call any of Franklin’s family members during the trial's penalty phase in an effort to try to focus on the issue of whether jurors had any lingering doubt about Franklin’s culpability for the crimes.