Vallejo pigs tase and murder

“...it’s time to wake up!”

May 20, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Willie McCoy’s niece is bringing to light further brutality by the Vallejo, California pigs. Twenty-year-old Deyana Jenkins says she was tased and then taken into custody on April 16, during a traffic stop. The cops admit they did tase Jenkins. Cell phone videos of the incident posted on YouTube don’t show Jenkins getting tased, but do show Jenkins on the pavement outside her car with officers kneeling over her. She can be heard repeatedly screaming, “I did not resist!” Jenkins says she did not have her ID, that she left it in another bag. But she denies the cops’ story that she and the other women in the car made threatening gestures at the cops. They were listening to music on their phones and using social media. Millions of kids do this all the time driving around. But doing this while Black will get you stopped, tased, and arrested.

On May 6, Vallejo police released body cam footage from the February 2018 shooting of a 33-year-old Black man, Ronell Foster. The cop who killed Foster, Ryan McMahon, is one of the cops who killed Willie McCoy. McMahon says he tried to stop Foster because he was riding a bike without a light. Foster continued to ride his bike—apparently a “crime” punishable by death. The bodycam footage shows McMahon chasing Foster and then fatally shooting him in the back and the back of the head. McMahon told the dispatcher, “I have a guy on a bicycle running from me.” About 50 seconds later, Foster is dead.

The pigs continued to say Foster tried to grab the cop’s flashlight in a “threatening manner” and that there was a “violent struggle.” But the video doesn’t corroborate this. Adante Pointer, the lawyer for Foster’s family, told the Guardian, “The video proves that the official police story is nothing but a fraud... Ronell Foster was unarmed, did not present an immediate threat to anyone and was killed for essentially riding his bike.”

The murder of Willie McCoy

On February 9, 2019, Vallejo police took the life of Willie McCoy, a 20-year-old Black man. A firing squad of six cops shot McCoy over 20 times in the head, ear, neck, chest, arms, shoulders, hands, and back. McCoy was seen asleep or passed out in his car in the drive-through lane of a Taco Bell. And someone called the police. Police say when they arrived they found the driver “unresponsive” and allege McCoy had a gun in his lap. Loved ones describe McCoy as a beautiful human, that he loved making music and spending time with his nieces and nephews. He was a rapper in a group called the FBG.

In a video with the audio of the shooting, posted to YouTube a few days after the shooting, police can be heard yelling commands at McCoy and firing at him less than three seconds later. The police video was not made public, but was shown to the McCoy family. David Harrison, McCoy’s cousin who watched the video, said, “They killed him in his sleep. He scratched his arm in his sleep. And they murdered him. There is no justification.” After the McCoy family demanded that the video be made public, it was finally released at the end of March. There is footage from each of the body cams of the six different pigs. It’s horrifying to watch and hear this six times: McCoy appears to move his arm, the pigs yell “show me your hands.” Three seconds later the pigs deliver a horrific barrage of rapid automatic gunfire into the car.