Only 9 seconds after arriving, KC cop pulled the trigger. But why was he even there?
Between Kenosha gunman Kyle Rittenhouse and Kansas City police detective Eric DeValkenaere, Wednesday was Sobbing Shooters Day.
Both men cried hard while testifying in their own defense.
“I did what I had to do to stop the person who was attacking,” Rittenhouse said. He’s the teenage vigilante who fatally shot two people and injured a third during the 2020 riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man.
In December of 2019, DeValkenaere shot and killed Cameron Lamb, a 26-year-old Black man, in his own backyard. It was a mere nine seconds — about the time it will take you to read this sentence — after arriving to investigate reports that Lamb had been … speeding.
He, too, said under oath on Wednesday that he’d fired because he had to.
He did that, he said, after seeing Lamb pull a gun from his waistband with his left hand and point it at his partner, Troy Schwalm: “I remember thinking no … this can’t happen, I can’t let this happen.”
Schwalm, who was standing right in front of Lamb’s truck as he was backing it into his basement garage, did not see a gun. In fact, according to prosecutors, Schwalm previously said that he saw that there was no gun in Lamb’s left hand. Lamb was not only right-handed, but had limited use of his left hand after he was shot in the index finger in 2015.
Lamb’s roommate, Roberta Merritt, testified that she had seen Lamb’s gun on the basement steps a few feet from where the shooting occurred, right before police arrived. And if that’s true, then prosecutors are right that the gun found just underneath Lamb’s left arm, which was hanging out his truck window when he died, was planted there. Phone records show he was also placing a phone call, from the cell in his right hand, at the time he was shot.
The first officer who arrived at the scene after the shooting testified that he didn’t see the gun either, but added that his view might have been blocked by his protective shield.
Prosecutors can’t prove the scene was staged, and they don’t have to: DeValkenaere was only charged with involuntary manslaughter — an unintentional killing that results either from recklessness or criminal negligence.
If running into a man’s backyard in the middle of the day, with guns drawn, based on nothing more than a report that he’d been driving way too fast isn’t just as reckless as going 90 mph in a residential neighborhood, I guess I don’t know that word means.
The prosecutor, Tom Dollar, kept saying DeValkenaere had violated Lamb’s rights by going onto private property without a warrant, without permission and without probable cause.
And DeValkenaere kept saying that he had a duty to go in because “we had a reasonable suspicion that crime was afoot.” He had to go in, too, he said, because his fellow officer already had, and “I’m not going to leave him in there by himself.”
If he had stopped to get a warrant, what crime would it even have been for, Dollar asked him. He didn’t know what might have been happening, he said.
“That’s why we didn’t” get a warrant.
Still, “I needed to be in that backyard,” to back up Troy Schwalm. And Schwalm needed to be there why?
Officer on private property with no warrant, gun drawn
Dollar asked the defendant once again to agree that he’d been on private property with no warrant, no information of a crime, no legal right to be there, and with gun drawn.
Oh, he did have the right, he said. And “all officers in my situation” would have gone in with weapons drawn.
That’s what bothers me the most.
That this isn’t some rogue bad guy, looking to kill somebody, but an officer staying absolutely true to his training and doing what the violent offender squad he was part of does, which is “proactively” try to stop crimes before they start.
Police were not very proactive after Lamb was shot, though; it was 14 minutes before paramedics were allowed to get to him, and he was dead by then. Because they hadn’t known who else might be in the house, they said.
Dollar asked DeValkenaere whether he ever stopped to think about whether there was a better way to approach a guy who’d been seen chasing another car down the street. “You never said, ‘We don’t have probable cause?’ ’’
“Not in the nine seconds I was back there before discharging my weapon, no.” Only nine seconds between his arrival and the time, as he put it, “I discharge a round to his central mass.” Then, he stepped back several yards and fired three more times.
This is a bench trial — DeValkenaere waived his right to a jury trial — so it will be up to Circuit Court Judge J. Dale Youngs to decide whether in doing what he did on Dec. 3, 2019, he recklessly caused Lamb’s death.
Of course I felt for DeValkenaere as he sobbed on the stand. And as he showed his nerves, too, jiggling his leg and twisting the wedding ring around on his finger. I don’t doubt that he’s sorry.
Sorrier still, though, are Lamb’s loved ones.
And even sadder than the sight of the officer breaking down was my view of the courtroom from the jury box where reporters were seated. From there, you could see that those filling the benches on the side of the room behind the officer they were there to support were all white, and that those there to support Cameron Lamb’s family were with the exception of two white activists all Black. That bifurcated courtroom looked like America to me — divided, angry, and grieving very different things.
On my way home from the courthouse, a car pulled around me, driving crazy fast, and a second one followed, chasing the first. If you’d just heard what I did, I thought, you’d slow the hell down.
