St. Louis ex-cop charged with on-duty murder of black man
A former American police officer in St. Louis, Missouri has been charged with the 2011 on-duty shooting death of an unarmed African American man.
St. Louis Police and US Marshals arrested Jason Stockley, 35, on Monday at his home in Houston, Texas, St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office spokeswoman Susan Ryan said.
The white policeman shot into Anthony Lamar Smith's car on December 11, 2011, sparking a high speed chase that ended in the 24-year-old black man’s death.
Stockley was on the passenger seat of a police SUV that chased Smith at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour and could be heard on an internal police car video as saying “going to kill this ******, don't you know it," the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
When Smith’s car crashed and slowed down, Stockley directed his partner to smash into the victim’s car.
He then got out of the SUV, approached the driver’s side of Smith’s vehicle and shot him five times, the statement added.
"We believe we have the evidence we need to prove Mr. Stockley's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law," St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce said.
Back then, police told local media that a gun was recovered from Smith’s vehicle. However, the prosecutor’s office said the only gun recovered from the scene had the police officer’s DNA on it.
Stockley got away with the execution-style murder at the time and left the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in 2013.
Additional evidence uncovered by police and the FBI was provided to prosecutors and led to the new charges.
Smith's family had settled the killing in 2013 for $900,000, after filing a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the city over the killing. The sum was the largest settlement for a police shooting case in the city's history.
The charges come amid public anger among African American communities following similar cases of police killings of unarmed black men.
According to a study released in January, a total of 1134 people were killed by American cops in 2015, marking a sharp increase compared to the 444 cases that the FBI had logged in 2014.
African Americans account for just 13 percent of America’s total population. This is while, according to the Mapping Police Violence project, 40 percent of the police killings in the country’s 60 biggest police departments were black.
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