From [HERE] A federal appeals court has revived a wrongful death claim against Walmart by the family of a Black man who was fatally shot by a white police officer inside a store in Beavercreek after picking up a pellet rifle from a shelf.

Twenty-two-year-old John Crawford III was shot at the store in suburban Dayton in August 2014 after a white man called 911. A judge dismissed his family’s wrongful death claim, but a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed that in a 2-1 decision Wednesday, the Associated Press reported.

Two judges concluded “a reasonable jury could find that Walmart failed to prevent Crawford from carrying a look-alike AR-15 openly around the store,” which could alarm shoppers, confuse police and cause an officer to respond as though the weapon were real.

The decision means the family can proceed toward trial on the wrongful death claim along with its other pending claims against the retailer, including negligence, one of the family's attorneys, Michael Wright, said Friday.

Friday evening, Walmart responded to a request for comment from News Center 7.

“We take the safety and security or our customers seriously and continue to sympathize with [the] family of John Crawford. We respectfully disagree with the court’s ruling, and we will continue defending the company,” said Randy Hargrove, senior director, National Media Relations Corporate Communications for the Bentonville, Arkansas, company.

The family previously settled a wrongful death claim with [WHITE] Beavercreek and its police.

A grand jury [WHITE PROSECUTORS] declined to indict the officer who shot Crawford.

Ronald Ritchie, the white 911 caller who reported that a Black man was “pointing a gun at children and people” in the store also wasn’t charged. The prosecutor who made that decision said he didn’t find evidence that the caller knew the information he provided was false. However, video synced with the time of his 911 call clearly show the Black man was not even interacting with other shoppers in the store, let alone pointing a gun at children or people. At any rate, police are required to independently corroborate the information they receive from dispatch and other sources in order to establish probable cause. When the white cop encountered Crawford he posed no threat to anyone.

In real life Crawford picked up an un-packaged BB/pellet air rifle from a display inside the store's sporting goods section and continued shopping in the store. Another customer, Ronald Ritchie, a racist suspect, called 911. According to Ritchie, Crawford was pointing the gun at people and at children walking by, and messing with the gun. All of the statements were lies or inaccurate statements.

Security camera footage showed that Crawford was talking on his cellphone and holding the B.B. gun as he shopped, but at no point did he aim the B.B. gun at anyone. His family said he was talking to the mother of his two children. Crawford continues to walk through Wal-Mart aisles and passes by other customers, who do not appear to react to his presence. 

After the security camera footage was released, Ritchie recanted his statement that led to the fatal shooting and stated, "At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody", while maintaining that Crawford was "waving it around". Two white officers of the Beavercreek Police arrived at the Walmart shortly after their dispatcher informed them of a "subject with a gun" in the pet supplies area of the store.

The video shows Crawford continuing through the store. He paused at some store shelves, and it appears he’s still on the phone, fiddling with the gun as it swings, pointed toward the ground. Then, police enter the frame to his side; you can see Crawford turn his head, fall to the ground, scramble in the other direction, then turn back around before ultimately falling to the ground. It’s unclear whether he dropped the gun before being shot or after.

Sean Williams, one of the two police officers that arrived, shot Crawford in the arm and chest. He was later pronounced dead at Dayton's Miami Valley Hospital.

According to Crawford's mother, the video shows the officers fired immediately without giving any verbal commands and without giving Crawford any time to drop the BB gun even if he had heard them.

The Guardian revealed that immediately after the shooting, police aggressively questioned Crawford's girlfriend, Tasha Thomas, threatening her with jail time. The interrogation caused her to sob uncontrollably, with hostile questions suggesting she was drunk or on drugs when she stated that Crawford did not enter the store with a gun. She was not yet aware of Crawford's death at the time of the interrogation. Thomas died in a car crash months later.

Following the shooting a grand jury decided not to indict any of the officers involved on charges of either murder, reckless homicide, or negligent homicide.

Lead prosecutor Mark Piepmeier, also a racist suspect, said that the case revolved around whether Crawford obeyed police orders to drop the gun. “Was the officer reasonable to think himself or someone else would receive physical harm?” Piepmeier said at a news conference, the Enquirer reported.  “The law says police officers are judged by what is in their mind at the time. You have to put yourself in their shoes at that time with the information they had.”

Less than two weeks before the incident Officer Williams and others received what prosecutors called a “pep talk” on how to deal aggressively with suspected gunmen. Williams and his colleagues in Beavercreek, a suburb of Dayton, were shown a slideshow invoking their loved ones and the massacres at Sandy Hook, Columbine and Virginia Tech while being trained on 23-24 July on confronting “active shooter situations”.

“If not you, then who?” officers were asked by the presentation, alongside a photograph of young students being led out of Sandy Hook elementary school in December 2012. A caption reminded the trainees that 20 children and five adults were killed before police arrived.

The white prosecutor then took the unusual step of presenting the set of 11 slides from a presentation given to officers in the July session and other evidence to a grand jury in Greene County. Piepmeier signaled that the slides may have been important to the decision. “A question I have, and I think a jury would have, is how are the officers trained to deal with a situation like that,” he told reporters. [wha? does that sound like he wanted to prosecute the cop?]

He described the presentation as “almost like a pep talk for police officers,” which informed them: “You have to go after these things, you can’t ignore them”. They were told to rid themselves of the mindset that “it’s a bad day to be a cop” when confronting people who “have used, are using or are threatening to use a weapon to inflict deadly force on others”. [MORE]

“And that was, really, the question for this jury,” said the special prosecutor. “Looking at everything, was the officer reasonable in thinking that either himself or someone else was going to receive death or serious bodily harm”. [MORE]

Crawford’s family released a statement after the grand jury decision: “The Wal-Mart surveillance video and eyewitnesses prove that the killing of John H. Crawford III was not justified and was not reasonable. It is undisputed that John Crawford III was in Wal-Mart as a customer and was not posing a threat to anyone in the store, especially the police officers.”

Crawford's mother believes that the surveillance tape shows the police lied in their account of events, and has spoken out against the killing at a "Justice for All" march. The family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Walmart and the Beavercreek police department. [MORE]

The Justice Department conducted its own investigation. White prosecutors at the Justice Department declined to issue charges against the white officer.

U.S. Attorney Benjamin Glassman, racist suspect in photo, said they found insufficient evidence to pursue charges against Beavercreek police Officer Sean Williams, who fired the fatal shot. They said investigators analyzed store surveillance video using resources at the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, interviewed witnesses and used an independent crime scene reconstruction expert in their review.

"The government would be required both to disprove his (Williams') stated reason for the shooting — that he was in fear of death or serious bodily injury — and to affirmatively establish that Officer Williams instead acted with the specific intent to violate Mr. Crawford's rights," they said in a statement, adding that the evidence "simply cannot satisfy those burden.