BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Kept under wraps for nearly two years, body camera footage of a policeman killing Alton Sterling shows the officer threatening to shoot the man and screaming profanities before firing the fatal shots that stoked protests across the nation.
The videos, released Friday as Baton Rouge’s police chief announced the firing of the white officer who shot Sterling six times, came days after the state attorney general declined to bring criminal charges against the two officers involved in the incident. The tapes show a police encounter that rapidly turned violent, descending into death threats, a football-style tackle and finally, the killing of a 37-year black man who was selling homemade CDs outside a convenience store in Louisiana’s capital city. Two cellphone videos of the incident quickly spread on social media after the shooting, but the new footage show the clearest and most complete picture of what happened that night.
