Body camera video was released this week of a March 16 police shooting that killed an Illinois man and the 4-year-old boy he was holding hostage.
The Macomb Police Department released the edited video Monday after a special prosecutor said he found no basis to charge the officers involved, identified by the police department as Lt. Nick Goc and Officer Korri Cameron.
The officers were removed after the shooting, standard procedure.
The shooting stemmed from a domestic violence incident at a Macomb apartment on March 16. The family identified the dead child as Terrell Marshawn Miller.
Goc and Cameron responded to the residence shortly after 10 p.m. after police received several 911 calls, the department said. A caller said they believed they heard gunshots, according to the police department.
When officers arrived, they found bloodstains on the wall of the building’s stairwell, body camera video shows. The police knocked on the apartment door, announced their presence and ordered the occupants to open up.
After officers heard a woman screaming for help and saying, “he’s stabbing me,” they forced entry into the apartment, police said.
The woman is seen in the video running into the living room. She tells officers that her son is in another room, the video shows. The child is heard in the video screaming.
“The officer orders the injured female to leave the home to a safe location,” police said in the narrated body camera footage. “What happens next happens in a matter of seconds.”
The suspect, who is naked and holding a knife in his left hand, runs into a room and reappears seconds later with a second knife and holding the child hostage.
Police said the man had a knife to the child’s throat and another to the child’s waist.
One of the officers fired a single shot, the video shows, hitting the suspect and the child. Police rendered aid and called medical personnel, but the suspect and child died at the scene, police said.
The woman, Keianna Miller, told the local station WGEM that she returned home to find her ex-boyfriend, 57-year-old Anthony George, intoxicated.
“Things went away,” she said. “He told me, ‘If I can’t have you, no one can.’
Miller suffered multiple stab wounds during the incident and was treated at a local hospital.
Officials said in a March 18 press release that the suspect refused to comply with multiple commands to drop the weapon and that police were “fearing for his safety” when the officer fired.
But attorney Marleen Suarez, who represents Miller, Terrell’s mother, questioned why police didn’t try to calm the situation.
“There was no de-escalation, no negotiations,” she said at a press conference on Monday. “I find it hard to believe that, in the heat of that moment, he didn’t stop to think. I don’t know what made him think he could hit that shot.”
According to the lawyer, the shooting happened about 16 seconds after police forced entry into the apartment. Suarez said the officer’s bullet hit Terrell in the head and George in the neck.
“[Keianna] told them, she was adamant when she was taken out of the apartment, her baby, her son was there,” Suarez told reporters. “So they knew there was a child there in her room.”
The shooting was investigated by the Illinois State Police and then turned over to the McDonough County State’s Attorney’s Office. The Illinois Appellate Attorney ruled that the officers would not be charged.
In a July 8 letter to the county state’s attorney, Special Prosecutor Jonathan H. Barnard said that after reviewing the evidence, he concluded “that there is no basis for any criminal action or prosecution that is supportable under the facts of this case against any of the police officers involved in this tragic accident,” WGEM reported.
Illinois State Police referred questions to the county state’s attorney’s office and the state’s attorney’s appellate prosecutor, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An internal police investigation remains ongoing. Officers could not be reached at the phone numbers listed for them.
Suarez said he plans to take legal action, saying the family believes “the officer acted recklessly.”
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