"I Can't Breathe [b/c you Shot me]:" Donnell Rochester Posed No Threat When Baltimore Race Soldiers Shot Him. Cops Handcuffed Him as He Died in the Street, Pretended like He was Ok, Freddie Gray Style
'I Think You Tried to Touch Me So Now I Can Kill You:' From [HERE] Video of the police killing of 18-year-old Donnell Rochester is harrowing.
Baltimore Police officers chase Rochester, who runs and then retreats back to his car, a white Honda Accord, and drives off.
“Get out the car, get out the car now,” cops yell at Rochester, who drives forward. Officer Connor Murray shoots at Rochester, whose car bumps Murray. Soon after, Officer Robert Mauri shoots at Rochester through the windshield and the Honda Accord stops, the car door opens, and Rochester, with his hands up, says, “I can’t breathe.”
He collapses into the street and repeats, “I can’t breathe.” Cops pull Rochester to the ground and try to handcuff him.
“Put your fucking hand behind your back,” Mauri, who shot Rochester moments before, yells.
“Start a medic,” Murray, who also shot Rochester, says over the radio. “Suspect in custody.”
Rochester, handcuffed, gasping for air, blood leaking out of him and onto the pavement of Chilton Street in Northeast Baltimore around 3PM on Feb. 19, is now surrounded by cops.
“What’s your name?” a cop asks.
Rochester can’t get it out: “My name is…”
“Where you hit at?” one cop asks Rochester. “Huh?”
Rochester struggles to answer. He has been shot in the chest.
“Where you hit at?” the cop asks again, impatient.
“He’s hit up top,” Murray says. “Upper chest.”
10 seconds later, another cop walks up to Rochester.
“Are you ok?” that cop asks Rochester.
“No,” Rochester responds.
Officers kneel over Rochester, trying to tend to the gunshot wound—or a “GSW,” as Mauri calls it over the radio at one point.
“Bro, where you shot at?” a cop asks.
Rochester struggles to answer.
“Where you shot at, bro?” the cop asks again.
“My stomach,” Rochester says, hard to hear.
“Turn him over, turn him over,” another cop advises.
The cops turn Rochester’s body around, still looking for the wound or wounds.
“I can’t breathe,” Rochester tells the cops.
Approximately 15 minutes after he was shot, Rochester was dead.