FBI will review Jacksonville police shooting that killed suspect Vernell Bing Jr. in May
The announcement by Sheriff Mike Williams and Jacksonville FBI Special Agent in Charge Michelle Klimt came almost three weeks after the 22-year-old died from one gunshot wound to the head.
Williams said the Sheriff’s Office’s standard review of any police-involved shooting will continue as usual. But after weeks of demands by community groups for an independent investigation into white officer Tyler Landreville’s actions against Vernell Bing Jr., the sheriff said he asked the FBI to step.
“The best course of action for our community is that the FBI will review this incident and provide results to the Department of Justice,” Williams said in a Friday news conference with Klimt. “This will be done to ensure that all processes required by law are followed.”
Klimt said the FBI will be joined by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in the review of any possible violations. If any federal civil rights violations are found, the FBI will investigate and submit results to federal prosecutors, she said.
“Under the provisions we have to prove the official was acting under the color of law or in their official capacity as a law enforcement officer and willfully deprived the victims of their civil liberties — the officer knew what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway and acted intentionally and unreasonably,” Klimt said.
Community leaders stood outside the Sheriff’s Office awaiting information on Friday’s news conference. They included Bing’s mother, Shirley McDaniel, whose friends announced that her dead son’s baby boy was born only a week ago.
“I am speechless to the fact that my son was murdered,” McDaniel said, getting emotional. “... I am glad they are moving forward, but that’s not going to bring my son back.”
Southern Christian Leadership Conference spokesman Ben Frazier, whose organization’s June 4 statement called Bing’s death “an execution” and an unjustified police shooting, said this kind of independent assessment is imperative “to ensure accountability and trust.”
“It is a move in the right direction,” Frazier said. “We don’t want to get too excited except to say that we have never been satisfied with the internal investigations.”
He said there’s also not a great deal of confidence in the office of State Attorney Angela Corey, which routinely rules police shootings justifiable.
“So yes, we are looking at this with great celebration, cautiously optimistic that there will in fact be an honest and thorough investigation,” Frazier said.
According to police, Landreville saw Bing driving a stolen Chevrolet Camaro convertible May 22 and chased it with his lights and sirens activated. At one point, the Camaro went down the wrong side of Main and Eighth streets and had a near miss with a woman and her child as well as a parked police car. Then the Camaro headed directly at the officer’s car and they collided at East Ninth and Liberty streets.
Witnesses said Landreville got out of his smashed cruiser and walked toward Bing, who was still in the Camaro. Landreville was giving Bing commands as his gun remained in its holster, police said.
“For some reason when the suspect exits from his car, something caused Landreville to unholster his weapon and shoot at the suspect multiple times,” Sheriff’s Office Chief Chris Butler said during a May 23 news conference on the incident.
Hit once in the side of his head, Bing died the next day.
A police officer usually gets represented by an attorney from his police union, in this case the Fraternal Order of Police. Union spokesman Shannon Hartley said it’s to ensure that the officer’s rights are protected when the administrative review is done and that any outcome reached is done so “in accordance with the negotiated collective bargaining agreements and state law.”
That also means that anything the officer tells the attorney “is protected as an attorney-client privilege and not subject to disclosure,” Hartley said.
Landreville’s attorney has delivered an official statement on the shooting to the Sheriff’s Office, but it will not be released as the department investigation continues to gather evidence and interview witnesses, Williams said Friday.
“We want to protect that statement. We want to protect all witness testimony at this point,” Williams said. “That is what gives validity to that testimony. ... We don’t need people creating the truth based on what someone else has said.”
The Sheriff’s Office normally does a criminal investigation on all police-involved shootings, while its cold-case detectives investigate and interview witnesses before it is all independently reviewed by the State Attorney’s Office. Then all evidence is submitted to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement crime lab for processing, creating what the sheriff has called “an impartial forensic component” to the investigation.
The State Attorney’s Office does its own separate justifiable use of deadly force review dealing specifically with “whether or not there are any potential criminal charges,” Corey said.
No administrative investigation can begin, according to Florida statute, until the criminal investigation is done by the State Attorney’s Office and its findings sent to the Sheriff’s Office’s Response to Resistance Board. That administrative investigation is held to determine if policy violations occurred. Those hearings are closed to the public and not announced ahead of time, police said.
The board is chaired by police Director Tom Hackney with two assistant chiefs, two lieutenants, four alternates and a non-voting general counsel, cold-case squad sergeant and a Sheriff’s Office firearms expert. Once they complete their findings, they are posted on the sheriff’s website.
The Sheriff’s Office has had seven police-involved shootings this year as of late May but said none has reached resistance board review. There are 10 completed summations on the website now for incidents in 2015, the last sent to Williams on March 1.
The sheriff did not have any statistics on how many police-involved shootings are reviewed by the FBI. National FBI statistics for 2014 indicate that its investigations of “color of law” cases involving law enforcement led to 72 indictments for violations of excessive force, sexual assaults, false arrest and fabrication of evidence, deprivation of property and failure to keep from harm.
