Just Laurie

A 2016 police body camera shows Daniel Shaver on his knees in a Mesa hotel hallway, hands up, sobbing "Please do not shoot me." He was unarmed. Officer Philip Brailsford shot him five times, was acquitted of murder, and got a $2,500-a-month pension for PTSD from that night. Shaver was 26, a pest-control worker from Texas with two little girls. Guests at the La Quinta Inn had seen someone point a rifle out of his fifth-floor window. It was a pellet gun he used for work, and it was still in the room when six officers lined up at the end of the hall. Sgt. Charles Langley ran the commands: "If you make a mistake, another mistake, there is a very severe possibility that you're both going to get shot." When Shaver started to ask something, Langley cut him off with "Shut up. I'm not here to be tactful or diplomatic with you. You listen, you obey." Then came the rules: legs crossed, hands up, never put them down for any reason, crawl toward us. While he crawled, his basketball shorts slid down and his hand went back toward his waist. Brailsford fired five rounds from an AR-15 with "You're f*cked" etched on it. Mesa's own incident report called the movement "consistent with attempting to pull his shorts up" and said "no other purposes for this movement appear to be viable." In the video below, the last 30 seconds of the body camera, from "Please do not shoot me" to the second before the shots. Then the Mesa city manager, asked by ABC15 where Brailsford's PTSD came from. Mesa fired Brailsford, and a jury acquitted him in December 2017. In 2018 the city quietly took him back without pay, long enough for him to apply for an accidental disability pension, and the board, with the city manager voting yes, gave him $2,500 a month. In 2022 Mesa paid Shaver's widow $8 million. Was it a split-second call any officer could have made, or an execution the city ended up paying a pension for?