LAS VEGAS (AP) - Carol Luke shouted at police officers during a June 1 demonstration in downtown Las Vegas. She gripped a protest sign in one hand, and a miniature urn carrying her son’s ashes in the other.
Thomas McEniry’s killing by Metro Police more than four years ago turned Luke into a recluse. She panics when she’s out. And when she encounters police and people, too, she’s uneasy around them. “I hurt,” she says.
But George Floyd’s death by police in Minnesota and subsequent protests inspired Luke to hit the streets in protest for the first time, demanding justice for her son as well.
That’s where Luke, proudly wearing a shirt with her son’s photo on it, had a brief encounter with Jorge Gomez.
Luke had joined a choir of chants directed at officers stationed on Fremont Street. As she waved the urn at them, a stranger walked up to hug her, momentarily soothing her by telling her, “I’m sorry about your loss. Tell your son’s story,” she remembers Gomez saying, which were among his last words. A Las Vegas Sun photographer captured a photo of them embracing.
Gomez, 25, was killed by police moments later after the protest turned unruly. It was one of two separate shootings related to the protest that night - the other left Metro Officer Shay Mikalonis on life support.
The four Metro officers who opened fire on Gomez saw him as a threat to their lives, a suspect they say pointed a gun at them, according to police.
His family saw his as a tender man who was passionate about his beliefs and who would walk up to a grieving woman to alleviate her pain, said Edgar Flores, their attorney. Gomez was also described as being passionate about dog rescues, music, fishing and nature.
Gomez’s family wants answers, transparency and justice if the shooting of Gomez was preventable, Flores said.
Police said that after they dispersed the crowd in downtown with tear gas and pepper balls, Gomez approached officers at the Lloyd D. George federal courthouse. The officers, who had seen protesters with bats, confused Gomez’s long gun that was swung around his shoulder with one, police said.
Fearing for their safety, an officer shot Gomez with low-lethal shotgun rounds, causing him to run, they said.
Four officers who were responding to Mikalonis’ shooting 3 miles (5 kilometers) south, encountered a running Gomez.
They got out of their vehicles and opened fire after, they say, he lifted his gun at them. Since the officers weren’t regular patrol officers, they weren’t required to carry body cameras, police said.
Four days later, police said they continued to search for additional video footage and declared that Gomez had been increasingly “radicalized,” noting that his family had expressed concern over his recent behavior.
But Flores says the contact between investigators and the family has been minimal. Search warrants hadn’t been served at their home, leaving Flores perplexed as to how they reached the conclusion that he was radicalized.
Gomez’s Facebook was peppered with anti-Donald Trump conspiracies, and he vaguely spoke of a revolution, but it wasn’t clear if that’s the only intelligence investigators had reviewed.
Furthermore, Gomez hadn’t set off alarms at home that he was a danger to himself or anyone else, said Flores, adding that the man, like the rest of his family, was a staunch Second Amendment supporter. They were only worried about Gomez attending the protests, in which officers had responded to attacks with tear gas and non-lethal projectiles, he added.
Gomez grew up shooting guns at the range with his family, and the idea that they respect law, order and the officers enforcing them, Flores said. Several members of his immediate family have ties to the U.S. military and federal government, he added.
The Gomez family does not want to make any assumptions, but they question the “chain of events that led to a tragedy,” Flores said. “We simply want to know the truth.”
Flores noted that while police said Gomez had approached them at the courthouse, a grainy video from across the street only shows Gomez on the public sidewalk before an officer is seen rushing him. It also shows Gomez running after he was shot by five bean bags.
Police had ordered the area dispersed, but Flores still wonders why police didn’t employ de-escalation techniques instead.
Citing the video, he said, “Even if that fear in the moment seemed somewhat reactive and rational, then obviously training should have allowed for de-escalation. If there’s a human being just walking, he has every right to be on a public sidewalk. There wasn’t a need to engage somebody who was just walking.”
The live rounds that brought Gomez down erupted seconds later after he took off running, off screen, on Las Vegas Boulevard and Bridger Avenue. “The community deserves to know, and the family deserves to know, and everybody to know is what happened those couple of seconds after,” Flores said.
“It doesn’t follow the narrative that he was trying to do harm, because even when they started shooting (bean bags) at him, his immediate reaction was not to try to engage them back,” Flores said. “His immediate reaction was to run.”
Flores wonders if the officers, knowing that an officer had been shot moments earlier, might have been on edge.
“We understand how incredibly terrifying and emotional it must have been for people who risk their lives every day, to learn that one of their own was shot,” Flores said. “And upon making contact and seeing somebody exercising their Second Amendment rights, we think that they were terrified and or very concerned.”
Flores also questions how an organized police department, which was tactical and methodological in dispersing protest crowds over that weekend, had failed to have officers with body cameras spread throughout the demonstration areas.
On Sunday evening, punishing gusts swung flower petals off an impromptu memorial built by the Gomez family on a tree at Lorenzi Park, where another police brutality demonstration was taking place. The yellow poster board displayed a picture of Gomez in a serious pose. His family, who have declined to be interviewed, listened to speeches while attendees attached flowers to the tree.
In a phone interview Sunday, Oja Vincent, with the activist media outlet Forced Trajectory Project, spoke about a “slow death.”
“The police kill somebody, and then they kill the family slowly,” he said in a metaphor. “Because (of) the stress, the anxiety, and then, especially those who choose to fight,” he said.
Flores said that the Gomez family is focused on grieving and getting a thorough account of what happened and that they’re praying for Officer Mikalonis and the four officers who shot their loved one.
Vincent said his organization speaks to families and witnesses of police shootings because most of the stories available are only those following an official narrative from authorities, which often only showcase officers as heroes.
“The only person who’s saying (Gomez) raised his gun,” Vincent said, “is a police officer, someone in uniform.”
Families that decide to share their stories don’t do it so the public feels sorry for them, Vincent added. The public has “the power to be a part of the change, but you must follow the families as a frontline.”
At a pair of protests over the weekend, Michael Yurkovskiy carried a white a “Justice for Jorge Gomez” sign.
Like Gomez, Yurkovskiy said, he also brought a firearm to the protest. He said that although his unloaded shotgun was in a case, swung around his shoulder, he knew he would be a target from suspicious looks from officers.
Though he didn’t interact with Gomez, he said he saw him throughout the night exercising his First and Second Amendment rights peacefully. He’s concerned that since the shooting wasn’t caught on video that Gomez is being vilified online, and that his death wasn’t being talked about enough.
Gomez “was not a threat, he wasn’t there to incite violence,” Yurkovskiy said. “I will not stop, I will not be silenced, his voice will not be silenced and his death will not be unheard.”
Luke, the woman who Gomez hugged the night of his death, is tormented at the thought that her son’s death may have “fueled” Gomez with anger that led to his death.
Although she says she wants justice from police and them to be held accountable, she doesn’t want her son’s death to be a catalyst to more tragedy. “It’s not right for anybody to be shot and killed,” she said amid tears at a recent peaceful protest.
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