A jury on Friday found 29-year-old Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez not guilty for fatally shooting black motorist Philando Castile during a traffic stop near St. Paul, an incident largely broadcast on Facebook live.
Yanez was charged with second-degree manslaughter and faced up to 10 years in prison. The jury also found him not guilty of two counts of reckless discharge of a firearm.
After the verdict, the city of St. Anthony, where Yanez was employed, announced he would not return to active duty and would be offered a separation package to leave the force.
Castile's mother, Valerie Castile, expressed anger and bewilderment during a televised news conference after the verdict.
"My son loved this state," she said. "He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the Twin Cities _ the state of Minnesota with TC on it. My son loved this city and this city killed my son, and a murderer gets away."
People have died to advance civil rights, but civilization was now devolving, not evolving, Valerie Castile said. "We're going back to 1969. Damn!" she said.
Castile's death last July garnered national attention when Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, began broadcasting on Facebook live shortly after he was shot. The video quickly went viral and prompted days-long demonstrations in Minnesota.
His death was one of a series of fatal police shootings in recent years that spurred nationwide conversations on the culture of policing.
Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton included his voice in that conversation shortly after the incident and suggested that had Castile been white, he wouldn't have been shot.
"Would this have happened if those passengers, the driver were white? I don't think it would have," Dayton told reporters. "So I'm forced to confront, and I think all of us in Minnesota are forced to confront, that this kind of racism exists."
The video shows that, in the moments before Castile died, a calm Reynolds tells him "stay with me," and then explains they had been pulled over for a broken tail light.
When Yanez pulled over the 32-year-old school cafeteria manager, who was in the car with Reynolds and her 4-year-old daughter, Castile told Yanez that he had a gun with him and was licensed to carry it, according to prosecutors. Yanez, who said he feared for his life, shot Castile moments later.
During the trial, Yanez testified that he saw Castile's gun and had ignored his orders not to pull it out. But prosecutors argued that was impossible and that Yanez had racially profiled Castile and pulled him over because he looked like a suspect in a robbery that had occurred earlier in the day.
A 10-page criminal complaint filed in Ramsey County District Court, based on interviews and dialogue captured on the video, described what happened. Yanez told Castile to leave his weapon alone. "Don't pull it out," Yanez said.
"I'm not pulling it out," Castile responded. "He's not pulling it out," his girlfriend added. Moments later Yanez fired seven shots, five of which hit Castile.
"You just killed my boyfriend!" Reynolds yelled.
"I wasn't reaching for it," Castile murmured. He died shortly after.
Castile was shot in Falcon Heights, a suburb near St. Paul. Law enforcement had reportedly pulled Castile over 52 times before his death.
"We need to stand in solidarity to let them know that we are ... a community and let people know we are here," Castile's mother, Valerie Castile, said in a video posted on Facebook a few days before the verdict was reached. "My son shouldn't have died in the matter that he had died."
The verdict in Yanez's trial comes amid a series of recent acquittals of other officer-related shootings. In May, the Justice Department announced that it will not indict Baton Rouge officers in the shooting of Alton Sterling. And later that month a jury acquitted a white Oklahoma police officer, Betty Shelby, in the shooting death of an unarmed black man named Terence Crutcher; a jury in Columbus, Ohio, declined to indict a white police officer who fatally shot a black 13-year-old boy who was playing with a BB gun.
