SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ Stephon Clark, the unarmed African-American man whose shooting by police has caused protests and national outcry, was shot six times in the back, an independent forensic pathologist said Friday.
Dr. Bennet Omalu conducted an autopsy days after Clark was killed by police. He told reporters that his examination showed that Clark was hit by eight bullets, and all but one entered while his back was turned toward police.
One bullet entered Clark's left thigh from the front and was probably fired while he was on the ground and had already been shot multiple times, Omalu said.
"That he was assailing the officers, meaning he was facing the officers, is inconsistent with the prevailing forensic evidence" as documented in the autopsy, he said.
The county coroner's official autopsy results are not expected to be completed for several weeks.
Clark, 22, was fatally shot in his grandmother's backyard on March 18 by Sacramento police, who were looking for a vandal in the neighborhood. More than 20 shots were fired.
Clark was found with a cellphone. No weapon was recovered.
The independent autopsy finding raises new questions about Clark's shooting. Police have released videos showing the incident but have urged the public not to pass judgment on officers until the investigation is complete.
"It's very simple. The narrative that's been put forth is they had to open fire because he was charging toward them," said civil rights litigator Ben Crump, who is representing Clark's family. Yet the autopsy shows, Crump said, "all of the bullets were from behind."
Omalu said it appeared that the coroner did not seek to determine the pathway of the bullets, key to determining their sequence.
A "cluster" of bullets that entered Clark's back decimated his body, each carrying "fatal capacity," Omalu said.
One round fractured Clark's right arm, shattering a section of bone into bits that completely lacerated all the blood vessels around the wound, he said, and another cut through Clark's flesh and hit his spinal cord, where it caused massive bleeding.
A round went under Clark's rib, piercing his lung and caused massive bleeding in his chest, Omalu said. Another injured his aorta.
The combination of trauma, bleeding and a punctured lung would have cut off oxygen to Clark's brain but he did not die instantly, Omalu said. It took several minutes, he said.
Omalu was brought in by lawyers for Clark's family in preparation for a planned federal lawsuit against the city and its police officers. He resigned last year as chief forensic pathologist in neighboring San Joaquin County, citing allegations the sheriff there sought to sway findings to protect officers responsible for fatal shootings. Others in Omalu's office also quit, but the sheriff denied the allegations.
Clark's family has disputed police accounts of what led to the shooting, which sparked days of protests in the state capitol and made national headlines. Another march is called for Saturday, to be led by retired NBA player Matt Barnes, a Sacramento native who once played for the Sacramento Kings and the Lakers.
Clark was buried after a funeral in Sacramento on Thursday attended by hundreds of mourners, including the Rev. Al Sharpton.
"We are here to say that we're going to stand with Stephon Clark and the leaders of this family. ... This is about justice," Sharpton said. "This is about standing with people with courage."
Clark's shooting is under investigation by city police, with oversight by the state Department of Justice.
Sacramento's mayor has called Clark's death "wrong," but said he cannot pass judgment on the officers' actions until that review is complete.
On Wednesday, a police spokesman said Clark remained the sole suspect in break-ins of vehicles and what a sheriff's deputy said was the attempted break-in of a home. It was a call about those incidents that sent police to the neighborhood the night Clark was shot.
A Sacramento County Sheriff's Department helicopter spotted a man in a backyard and directed police toward him, authorities said. Deputies told officers that the man had picked up a "toolbar" and broken the window of a home.
The man was seen running south, toward the front of the house, where he stopped and looked into another car, police said. Police body camera footage shows officers intercepted Clark in the backyard of his grandmother's house, and one of them yelled "gun!" as he turned a corner and saw Clark. The officer ducked back momentarily, then looked around the corner again and, shouting "gun! gun! gun!" began rapid fire. His partner then joined in the shooting.
The officers told other police who arrived on the scene they thought Clark was pointing something at them. "It looked like a gun from our perspective."
The object found when they rolled over Clark's bleeding body was a white cellphone.
Clark was pronounced dead at the scene. Police video shows that several minutes passed until officers approached Clark's body. They then handcuffed him before appearing to attempt resuscitation. Omalu said Friday that it would have taken from three to 10 minutes for such wounds to kill Clark. "Every minute you wait decreases the probability of survival," he said.
In police videos, a sergeant pulls the two officers to the side and a voice says, "Hey, mute," before the sound cuts off, indicating that the audio recording had been stopped.
Sacramento's police chief said the request to mute "builds suspicion" and is part of the investigation.
It appears the order to silence recording came from a top officer.
Police body camera videos show a sergeant pulled the two officers aside as medics attended to Clark, asking one of them how many shots they fired and in what direction.
The sergeant then brought the officers to the street and is heard saying "hey mute" with a hand on his own body camera. The audio of both of the officers goes dead.
Clark's family has denied he had anything do with any break-ins. His grandmother said she heard gunfire in her backyard and asked her husband to call police. But it turned out the police were already there, having just fatally shot Clark.
"Why didn't you shoot him in the arm? Shoot him in the legs? Send in dogs? Send in a Taser? Why? Why?" Sequita Thompson said.
Sacramento police have refused to name the two officers who shot Clark, but they were identified by an area civil rights attorney who saw their names on unedited video captured by the body cameras they wore.
One of the officers, who is African-American, grew up in the Sacramento Valley and joined the department in 2016 after prior work with a police department in Mississippi. Video shows he stepped in beside his partner to shoot at Clark after the gunfire had started.
According to the videos, the first to fire was a white officer who state police records show has been with the city department since 2014.
There is no indication of either officer being named in state or federal litigation alleging police misconduct while in Sacramento, court dockets show.
It is common in police shooting cases, after one officer opens fire, for his partner to also begin shooting without seeing the threat, said John Burris, an Oakland-based lawyer whose firm has assisted in gathering evidence for the Clark case. "The other just shoots in response," Burris said.
Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor and former Tallahassee, Fla., police officer who studies police shootings, said that "watching the helicopter video, it seems the officers are shooting after (Clark) is down on the ground." Stoughton said the shots in the back suggest that the young man was likely down or had fallen to the ground when officers continued to fire.
But "just because someone is on the ground, it does not mean they are not a threat," he said. "The big question here is was the shooting justified at all. And I don't think the videos provide a clear answer one way or another."
The officers turning off the audio recording of the shooting is also problematic, Stoughton said. He said that officers shut off the audio either to corroborate their stories or because they felt they needed a moment of privacy after such a traumatic event.
"Just because we can understand why an officer turned off their recording, it doesn't make it OK," he said.
Ed Obayashi, a Plumas County sheriff's deputy and a legal adviser to the department, said he believes the officers' decision to shoot was reasonable under the circumstances, especially since they believed the object in Clark's hands was a weapon and one of the officers had yelled, "Gun, gun."
"The shots in the back. They don't change my opinion at all," he said. "This is a situation of 2 to 2 { seconds with multiple rounds being fired here, and that time passes very fast. The human brain _ the mind in these situations _ cannot process quick enough to stop firing."
Retired Los Angeles County Sheriff's Cmdr. Charles "Sid" Heal also said the autopsy findings need to be look at in a larger context.
"I am not surprised he was shot in the back ... he may have turned and run." Heal said the officer's deadly shooting "are just not pretty."
In this case, he said, "the officers made their decision based on circumstances. Is that reasonable, is the question. Once you are convinced the suspect has a weapon, you go into response mode. Self-preservation takes over. We try to train that out of people."
