Donald Trump’s campaign manager sought to tamp down criticism of Donald Trump’s insensitive tweet Saturday which looked to capitalize on the shooting death of NBA star Dwyane Wade’s cousin.
“He tweeted his condolences to the family right after that,” Kellyanne Conway said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“I would like everybody to know about both tweets, because I think it’s incredibly important for all of us to come together in a very nonpartisan fashion and express our condolences to families like the Wade family and also our outrage that things like this can happen.”
Trump on Saturday faced backlash over his tweet about Nykea Aldridge, who was caught in crossfire and shot in the head and arm while leaving a school in Chicago.
“Dwayne [sic] Wade’s cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!” he tweeted. He later posted another tweet expressing his condolences to the family.
Conway says Trump tweeted his condolences “right after” the first tweet, but that’s not accurate.
If you check the time stamps on the original tweet and then the “condolences” tweet they were four hours apart. The first was sent at 6:24AM, the second at 10:48AM.
It took Trump more than four hours to realize how heartless he appeared. And more importantly, “condolences” weren’t his first impulse.
By the way, Trump couldn’t even manage to spell Dwyane Wade’s name correctly in his original tweet.
A man identified as Omar Marteen went on a deadly shooting spree at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, last night killing 50 and leaving 53 more hospitalized.
The shooting incident began at 2AM with approximately 320 people in the club.
It is officially the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States.
Mateen — who was armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and a handgun, according to Orlando’s police chief — entered Pulse club around 2 a.m. Sunday morning and began shooting. After most of the 320 people there escaped, Mateen took hostages from a group that was hiding in a bathroom. Shortly before 6 a.m., a SWAT unit breached the club and engaged Mateen in what’s being called a protracted gun battle. Mateen was killed.
The police classified the attack as a “terror incident. The police and the federal authorities said they were pursuing several angles in the terrorism investigation, both overseas and in the United States.
The shooting was clearly a hate crime meant to target LGBT people, and is being investigated as an act of terrorism.
Law enforcement sources told NBC News that Mateen was born in New York in 1986 and was listed as living at a residence in Port St. Lucie, about 125 miles south of Orlando. The incident is being investigated as an act of terrorism, officials said.
Mir Seddique, Mateen’s father told NBC News, “this has nothing to do with religion.” Seddique said his son got angry when he saw two men kissing in Miami a couple of months ago and thinks that may be related to the shooting.
“We are saying we are apologizing for the whole incident. We weren’t aware of any action he is taking. We are in shock like the whole country,” Seddique said.
According to CNN, the terrorist called 911 about the attack, pledged allegiance to ISIS and mentioned the Boston bombers, according to a U.S. official.
Equality Florida, the state’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) civil rights organization is collecting contributions via a GoFundMe page to support the victims of the horrific shooting at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub. Please contribute and share this page.
We are reeling from the tragic news that a gunman opened fire on the 2am capacity crowd at Pulse leaving 20 people dead and 42 injured according to preliminary reports. We are heartbroken and angry that senseless violence has once again destroyed lives in our state and in our country.
Gay clubs hold a significant place in LGBTQ history. They were often the only safe gathering place and this horrific act strikes directly at our sense of safety. June commemorates our community standing up to anti-LGBTQ violence at the Stonewall Inn, the nightclub that has become the first LGBTQ site recognized as a national monument.
We have received a steady stream of emails and messages from those seeking to help or to make sense of the senseless. We make no assumptions on motive. We will await the details in tears of sadness and anger. We stand in solidarity and keep our thoughts on all whose lives have been lost or altered forever in this tragedy.
President Barack Obama will address the nation about the terror attack in Orlando at 1:30pmET from the White House briefing room.
Tamir Rice of Cleveland would be alive today had he been a white 12-year-old playing with a toy gun in just about any middle-class neighborhood in the country on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014.
But Tamir, who was shot to death by a white police officer that day, had the misfortune of being black in a poor area of Cleveland, where the police have historically behaved as an occupying force that shoots first and asks questions later.
[snip]
The Police Department’s disregard for life was fully evident in the way the officers behaved after shooting Tamir. A surveillance video shows them standing by the child for four minutes without giving medical assistance, which was finally provided by an F.B.I. agent who happened to be in the neighborhood. Officer Frank Garmback, Officer Loehmann’s partner, nonetheless tackled the wounded boy’s 14-year-old sister as she tried to rush to his side. One can only imagine her suffering as she watched in handcuffs from the back seat of the squad car while her brother lay bleeding on the ground.
In addition to portraying the killing as a result of a tragic misunderstanding, prosecutors have also suggested the officer’s decision to kill Tamir was shaped by the fact that the surrounding neighborhood had a history of violence and that the boy appeared to be older than 12 because he was big for his age.
These arguments sidestep the history of violent, discriminatory police actions that led up to this boy’s death. They also have the reprehensible effect of shifting the responsibility for this death onto the shoulders of this very young victim.
It’s worth noting that since the officer involved in the shooting said Tamir “looked” 18 years old, and Ohio is an open carry state, why did he assume Tamir was a danger and shoot within seconds of arriving on the scene?
And where is the NRA defending the “right” of a person perceived to be an adult to carry a weapon in a state with open carry laws?
If Tamir had been a white teenage girl, he would be alive today. Period.
An Ohio grand jury has decided not to return an indictment in the 2014 police shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, prosecutor Tim McGinty said Monday.
Rice was holding a pellet gun when he was shot. It was “reasonable” to believe that the officer who killed the boy was facing a threat, McGinty said.
The officer was in training outside a Cleveland recreation center in November 2014. The shooting sparked controversy given Tamir’s age and the fact that he had a gun that resembled a handgun.
McGinty called Rice’s killing an “absolute tragedy.”
“But it was not, by the law that binds us, a crime,” he said. He said he has “heard the chants” that cry for justice for the boy.
“We too want justice for Tamir,” he said. But it would not be justice to bring charges against the officers involved in the shooting if those charges “could not be sustained.”That, however, “doesn’t mean the legal system is done,” he said. The civil courts may provide some accountability to the boy’s family “that they deserve,” McGinty said.
The shooting of a child should “never happen again,” he said, and he urged that toy gun manufacturers stop making their products look so much like real guns.
Tamir had been playing near the swings of a recreation center near his home when he was shot on November 22. He died a day later.
WARNING: This video contains graphic content. Watch the full bodycam footage of the shooting incident that resulted in the death of Samuel Dubose on July 19th. Posted by msnbc on Wednesday, July 29, 2015
University of Cincinnati Police Officer Ray Tensing was indicted Wednesday on a murder charge for fatally shooting Samuel DuBose during a traffic stop July 19.
Samuel DuBose was stopped for not having a front license plate.
The footage above is from Officer Tensing’s body cam.
Things escalate at about the 2:15 mark.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters issued this statement after releasing the body cam video to the public: “It’s an absolute tragedy that anyone would behave in this manner. It was senseless. It’s just horrible. He purposefully killed him.”
Officer Tensing originally said DuBose tried to run him down and he feared he would get “sucked up under the car.”
According to CNN, Dylann Roof, the 21 year old gunman who shot and killed nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Wednesday night, told investigators that he wanted to start a race war.
One survivor of the incident said that Roof responded to a man’s pleas to stop shooting by saying, “No, you’ve raped our women, and you are taking over the country … I have to do what I have to do.”
His roommate told ABC News that Roof was “big into segregation.” And the Berkeley County, South Carolina, government tweeted a picture of him wearing a jacket with flags from apartheid-era South Africa and nearby Rhodesia, a former British colony that was ruled by a white minority until it became independent in 1980.
By telling authorities his aim, Roof admitted he attacked unarmed civilians for political purposes in an act of terror.
John Mullins recalls “racist slurs in a sense” that Roof made while the two attended White Knoll High School in Lexington, South Carolina, though he also remembers him having black friends.
“He would say it just as a joke,” Mullins told CNN. “I never took it seriously. But … maybe they should have been.”
Joey Meek told ABC that talk of reinstating segregation was nothing new for Roof, his roommate. He’d been plotting something for six months, though “he never did any of that,” and authorities weren’t tipped off.
“I think he wanted something big like Trayvon Martin,” Meek said, referring to the black Florida teen whose shooting death at the hands of George Zimmerman — who was acquitted of murder — provoked huge protests. “He wanted to make something spark up the race war again.”
The Huffington Post is reporting that a grand jury has indicted former North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager on the charge of murder in the April shooting of an unarmed black man, the prosecutor announced on Monday.
“I think the people of the 9th circuit elected me to be accountable to them, and that’s what we intend to do,” Charleston County Solicitor Scarlett Wilson said during a news conference following the announcement of the indictment Monday. “They have to know they have someone prosecuting the case who is accountable to them.”
A South Carolina police officer has been charged with murder after witness video showed the officer shooting an unarmed man in the back.
North Charleston officer Michael Slager will now be charged with murdering Walter “Lamar” Scott, 50, who died shortly after the Saturday morning incident. A murder conviction in the state could lead to the death penalty or up to 30 years to life in prison, according to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.
The two videos that Scott family attorney Chris Stewart said were recorded by a bystander, whose name has not been released, appear to show the moments when Scott begins to run away from the officer. While the officer’s stun gun is not visible in the video, what appears to be a string is visible stretching from Scott to Officer Slager, where it was apparently attaching the stun gun to his clothing. Scott is seen running away from Slager as the officer proceeds to fire eight successive shots in Scott’s direction before Scott falls to the ground.
“I can tell you that as a result of that video and the bad decision made by our officer he will be charged with murder and that’s not something that we like to hear,” Mayor R. Keith Summey said at a news conference this evening.
The incident began with a traffic stop by Slager, who has been with the North Charleston police department since 2009.
Watch the video below and see if the police officer had reason to “fear for his life” as he fired the fatal shots.
