Category: United States

Groups the States

‘Nobody’s Going to Shoot You,’ He Said, Five Minutes Before She Got Shot

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“De-escalation” is the buzzword in law enforcement these days. Police are trained to reduce the risk of violence in confrontations by talking in a reassuring manner to the subjects of their investigations. There is also a lot of emphasis on “less lethal” weapons like tasers and beanbag guns as ways to avoid shooting suspects. In all of this, Nashville Officer Ben Williams was doing a great job with Melissa Wooden.

It was all fine, up until she got shot. Here, watch the bodycam video and see for yourself what went wrong with this situation:

 

When Officer Williams arrives on the scene, his first challenge is to get Wooden — who is mentally ill and suicidal — to move away from the other officer’s vehicle. He succeeds in this task, advancing step by step in such a way that she retreats from the road. Everything is going splendidly up until about the 3:50 mark on the video, when Wooden’s grandmother comes rolling down the driveway on her electric scooter.

“I ain’t scared of her,” says grandma. “Melissa, put that stuff down!”

Everything begins going downhill from there. Officer Williams now has to worry about protecting grandma from this lunatic who has armed herself with a baseball bat and a pickaxe and is obviously ready to die.

Well, “less lethal,” right? So he tries the taser, which doesn’t work.

If you’ve watched as many of these police videos as I have, this is predictable. Tasers are not a reliable weapon. The cop would have done better to charge her with a nightstick — c’mon, a woman versus a muscular cop? No doubt who would win that confrontation, but video of a cop whacking a crazy woman with a nightstick wouldn’t do much for “community relations,” see? So he used the taser, which only enraged the crazy woman. She then charged at Officer Williams, which prompted Officer Brandon Lopez to shoot her. Totally justified, I might add.

Nobody rioted in Nashville. CNN didn’t go 24/7 on the story. There were no #Justice4Melissa hashtags or “Crazy Lives Matter” marches.

Cops can shoot white people every day and nobody cares.

Melissa Wooden was in critical but stable condition as of Saturday, so she failed at her suicide-by-cop gambit — just barely — and I will leave it to readers to decide for themselves the lessons of this encounter, beyond the most obvious lesson: Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Something Has Gone Disastrously Wrong With the Criminal Justice System in Ohio

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Say hello to Cortez Turray Larkin, Ohio’s one-man crime wave.

If I were a citizen of Ohio, I would be bombarding my state legislators with emails and telephone calls demanding to know why the state has been unable to keep this lifelong criminal locked up. On Memorial Day 2016, police in Columbus arrested Larkin for shooting a man in the head. Police noted: “One of the gunshots missed the victim & struck the home of a neighbor. Luckily no one was injured inside.” The report also noted that this was the 14th time Larkin had been arrested by Columbus Police. That doesn’t include his arrests in other jurisdictions.

At the time of his Memorial Day 2016 shooting arrest, Larkin was 33 and had only recently been released from an Ohio prison after serving time for charges in Marion County, where he had been arrested in November 2014 and charged with receiving stolen property, falsification and conveyance or possession of a deadly weapon.

Did I mention he shot somebody in the head? The victim somehow survived, but still you might think shooting somebody in the head would be a serious enough crime to put Cortez Larkin away for a long time. But this is Ohio, where apparently it’s impossible to lock anyone up for anything, so by 2018, Larkin was back on the streets. How do I know this? Because he was committing felonies, which is what he does whenever he’s not behind bars. One imagines detectives in Ohio have an easy time solving cases; just ask, “Where was Cortez Larkin when this crime happened?” If he doesn’t have an alibi, he did it.

In January 2018, a Delaware County grand jury indicted Larkin for two felony counts of receiving stolen property, but if you thought these charges would be enough to put this criminal back in prison for a long sentence, you don’t know how useless Ohio’s criminal justice system is.

On January 5 of this year, a state trooper clocked a speeding car near Bowling Green, Ohio. After running the license plate, the trooper learned that the Ford Escape was stolen. The driver of the stolen Ford then led troopers on a 60-mile pursuit all the way down I-75 to Cridersville. Police used “stop sticks” to deflate the tires on the car, but the suspect kept going another 10 miles driving on the rims, and wasn’t stopped until troopers set up a “rolling roadblock” and rammed the Ford off the highway. Another 20 minutes was spent in a standoff before the suspect finally exited the vehicle, at which point troopers learned they had apprehended — you guessed, didn’t you? — Cortez Turray Larkin.

 

You won’t be surprised to learn that, after troopers arrested Larkin, they learned there were “multiple felony warrants out for his arrest.”

Why even bother arresting criminals, if judges just turn them loose?

Next time some liberal starts whining about “mass incarceration,” just cite the example of Cortez Larkin. If this guy can’t be kept in prison, how can anyone claim we have a “mass incarceration” problem?

And if you live in Ohio, please for the love of God contact your state legislators and ask them to do something to stop this madness. Unless Ohio starts locking up habitual offenders for long sentences, nobody’s life or property will be safe. If you can’t keep Cortez Larkin behind bars, what’s the point of even having prisons at all?




 

Blood in the Water: Why Have Democrats Turned Against Andrew Cuomo?

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Headline from the Washington Post:

Cuomo’s behavior created ‘hostile, toxic’ workplace culture for decades, former aides say

Mere weeks ago, Cuomo was embraced as a hero by Democrats and celebrated by their media allies, who bestowed an Emmy Award on him.

So why does it seem that the same forces that made Cuomo a hero are now determined to destroy him? Ace offered this analysis:

A friend speculates that this Late Hit on Cuomo — the hit should have come in freakin’ May, of course — is being coordinated by Kamala Harris, who knows Biden will die in office and that she herself has very little affection among Democrats. She is therefore, per this theory, taking out the man most likely to challenge her in 2024.
That’s why the media is now reporting on this. Not because they’re honest, not because they’re brave.
But because a Democrat gave them their marching orders.

It makes sense. Everybody — and I mean, everybody — can see that Biden is approaching the last stages of helpless, drooling senility. If it’s this bad now, just weeks after inauguration, how much worse will it be this time next year? Can anyone imagine Biden standing in Congress next February to deliver his State of the Union address? He can’t even do a press conference now, and babbles incoherently anytime he’s in front of a microphone without a script. This means that Harris will almost certainly become president sooner rather than later, and Team Kamala realized Cuomo was a potential primary rival for 2024, so suddenly a bunch of women decided it was time to “come forward” even though Cuomo’s habitual lechery and bullying was never really a secret.

Everyone is supposed to pretend that the timing of this scandal was just a coincidence. Women did not “come forward” earlier because reasons.




 

Governor Gropo

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Gosh, he was a Democratic Party hero just a few weeks ago:

A third woman came forward on Monday to accuse New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of inappropriate sexual behavior, saying he grabbed and kissed her at a 2019 wedding.
Anna Ruch, 33, told the New York Times that the 63-year-old governor made unwanted advances toward her and planted an unsolicited kiss on her cheek at the reception in Manhattan.
“He said, ‘Can I kiss you?’” Ruch recalled. “I was so confused and shocked and embarrassed.”
The allegation comes after two former state staffers accused Cuomo of sexual harassment on the job — including one who claimed the governor kissed her without warning at his Manhattan office, which he has denied.
Unlike the other two women, Ruch has never been employed by the governor or the state, according to the Times.
Ruch, a former member of the Obama administration and the 2020 Biden campaign, said she met Cuomo at the crowded wedding reception in September 2019.
Within moments of being introduced, Ruch claims, the gov put his hand on the small of her lower back, which was exposed in an open-back dress.
“I promptly removed his hand with my hand, which I would have thought was a clear enough indicator that I was not wanting him to touch me,” she told the Times.
But the governor apparently didn’t get the hint.
He allegedly noted that Ruch seemed “aggressive” — and then placed his hands on her cheeks and asked if he could kiss her, loudly enough for a friend of Ruch’s to hear, according to the report.
“I turned my head away and didn’t have words in that moment,” Ruch said.
Ruch said she was so shocked, she had to ask a friend whether the gov’s lips had actually touched her face as she was pulling away. She was told that he kissed her cheek.
The pal captured the creepy encounter in a series of photographs, including one Ruch also provided to The Post that shows Cuomo grasping her face.
“It’s the act of impunity that strikes me,” Ruch said. “I didn’t have a choice in that matter. I didn’t have a choice in his physical dominance over me at that moment. And that’s what infuriates me.”

See, there was a time — in the 1980s, when Cuomo was the strutting young scion of a political dynasty and Donald Trump was still a Manhattan real-estate mogul — that a guy could make a move like that and the worst he risked was maybe getting punched by the girl’s boyfriend. But nobody was going to punch Andrew Cuomo back in the day, and so he got used to putting the moves on any chick that caught his eye. Well, times have changed and Cuomo is now 63 years old. On what planet does a guy his age think it’s OK to make a move on a chick 30 years his junior? I mean, flirting is one thing, but . . .

Anyway, he was becoming an embarrassment to the party, with his COVID-19 policy that killed thousands of little old ladies, and so now we have women “coming forward,” as they say, to tell everybody that Cuomo’s a creepy old pervert. Next up? The hair-sniffing Joe Biden. As soon as Biden’s dementia becomes undeniable, the women will start “coming forward” to destroy Creepy Uncle Joe.

Cynical? Yeah, but these are Democrats, remember.




 

Criminal Dies in Minnesota Shootout

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It’s always heartwarming news when cops shoot a white criminal. CNN won’t notice and there won’t be any riots — no “say his name” hashtags on behalf of Dominic Lucas Koch, who was 27 when he died of multiple gunshots after leading police on a 40-mile chase in Minnesota.

We’ll get to the events that culminated in Koch’s death in just a minute, but first allow me to recount his criminal record. Like so many of the felons we routinely highlight in our crime coverage here, Koch was a repeat offender. In his hometown of St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin, Koch was 18 when he was arrested in connection with a case in which one of his buddies, Tyler Chute, had assaulted a sheriff’s deputy. Chute escaped, and two days later, cops got a tip about where he was hiding:

Deputies went to the home Saturday night and were allowed inside. But they were told Chute was not there.
Then something caught their eye.
“A guy was sitting on the couch and cushions were a little askew, and (the deputies) said, ‘Hey, that doesn’t look right,’ ” Sheriff Pete Johnson said.
A deputy asked the man sitting on the sleeper sofa, Dominic Koch, 18, if he knew where Chute was. Koch, who also lives in St. Croix Falls, said he did not, according to a sheriff’s report.
The deputy moved the cushions and found Chute hiding inside the sofa, the report states.
Chute was taken into custody, and Koch was arrested on suspicion of obstructing an officer.

After harboring a fugitive from justice in 2012, Koch’s criminal career next made headlines in 2018, when he got busted with meth:

A Minnesota woman and St. Croix Falls man were arrested in Clark County after police found drugs in their vehicle.
Officials responded to a complaint that someone stole a purse in Fairchild around 3:30 p.m. Friday and found the vehicle belonging to Samantha Waterbury, 24, and Dominic Koch, 24, west of Neillsville, according to a news release from the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. The two denied being in Fairchild and said there weren’t any drugs or weapons in the car.
Officials searched the vehicle and found 38.5 grams of crystal methamphetamine, 1.8 grams of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, the release stated. They also discovered eight cell phones, two iPads and a computer. Officials didn’t find the missing purse.
Waterbury faces charges of possession with intent to deliver, possession of THC and drug paraphernalia, and obstruction. Koch is charged with possession of methamphetamine, possession with intent to deliver narcotics and obstruction.
Waterbury is being held in Clark County jail on a $500 cash bond. Koch is being held under a probation hold and $20,000 cash bond.

What we can infer from Koch being on a “probation hold” is that he was already on probation for some unspecified previous crime, and you might think that getting caught with more than an ounce of meth would have been enough to put him behind bars for a while. An “eight-ball” of meth (3.5 grams, or one-eighth of an ounce) sells for about $50, so Koch had nearly $600 worth of meth on him when he was busted.

That’s second-degree possession, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. There’s a mandatory minimum sentence of three years, if the suspect has a prior drug felony. For whatever reason, however, Koch was back on the street pretty quickly, and he and a buddy were driving a stolen Jeep when Koch decided to go shoplifting at a Kohl’s department store in the Minneapolis suburb of Blaine, Minnesota:

A Wisconsin man and sole survivor of the duo who allegedly carjacked a man and his 9-year-old daughter on Sunday and fled police was charged Tuesday with first-degree aggravated robbery and fleeing police. Both are felony-level offenses.
Joseph William Heroff, 26, of Hammond, Wis., is being held at the Anoka County jail with bail set at $500,000. Dominic Lucas Koch, 27, of St. Croix Falls, Wis., died of multiple gunshot wounds after he was shot by police, according to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
In the criminal complaint, Heroff told police he and Koch had driven a white Jeep Compass to Kohl’s at 10311 Baltimore St. in Blaine on Sunday afternoon. While inside the store, Koch decided to shoplift.
Heroff told police he did not want to shoplift, so he went outside and waited in the car. A short time later, Koch came running out of the store with a cart full of merchandise, which he began shoving into the vehicle, the complaint said.
Heroff admitted to police that he was the driver at this point, according to the complaint. Officers quickly located the Jeep and attempted to stop it, but the vehicle fled through the Kohl’s parking lot into the adjacent Menards parking lot.
Officers caught up with them and maneuvered a squad to stop the vehicle. The two men then ran across a frozen drainage pond towards the Conquer Ninja Gym facility.
After reaching the parking lot, Heroff reported that Koch pulled out a gun and ordered a man and his 9-year-old daughter out of a pickup truck.
The father told police he and his daughter were waiting in the truck for a birthday party that was about to start at the gym when the men approached and they exited their vehicle, which the men then stole. They sped away.
The two fled north on Minnesota 65. The vehicle was disabled just north of Minnesota 107 near Braham and the men ran. Police said they pursued and gunfire was exchanged.
Koch was killed and Bravo, an Anoka police dog, was injured. He is recovering. Heroff was arrested and uninjured.

Good-bye and good riddance, criminal scum. Watch the video:

 

When I first watched that video, I had no idea who the suspects were. A carjacking in a Minneapolis suburb? So I had to Google it, and was honestly surprised when I saw the names and mugshots of the suspects. Two white meth freaks on a criminal rampage? Not what I’d expected, but it’s nice to be able to report a bit of “social justice” news:

COPS SHOOT WHITE CRIMINALS, TOO

You’ll never see that headline at CNN, though.




 

Philadelphia: Carjack City, U.S.A.

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Carjackings increased 80% last year in Philadelphia, when there were 404 carjackings, and January’s numbers show an even further rise:

There has been a surge in the number of these brazen crimes across the city in recent months. Police aren’t quite sure what’s fueling the rise.
In January, there were 59 carjackings, up from 18 at the same time last year, according to the Philadelphia Police Department — a more than threefold increase.
This year’s uptick is a continuation of a disturbing trend that unfolded through last year, when many were out of work or had to work from home because of the coronavirus. There were 404 carjackings in 2020, up from 225 in 2019 and 230 in 2018, according to the department.

Fifty-nine carjackings in a single month — that means there are two carjackings in Philadelphia on a typical day. I learned of this disturbing trend last night after I watched video of a Friday police chase:

Philadelphia police arrested a man late Friday night who they believe carjacked two people, including a pizza delivery driver whose family was inside the car when it was stolen.
Investigators say a driver for City View Pizza was making a delivery on the 3600 block of North Broad Street around 9 p.m. when Marcel Jenkins hopped into his Saturn L200 and drove away.
The delivery driver’s 25-year-old wife and 2 young children were inside the car when it was stolen, according to police. The family was later reported safe.
Jenkins, who police say lives in North Philadelphia, rammed into several parked cars on the 700 block of Race Street and later abandoned the stolen car on Spring Garden Street.
Police say Jenkin stole a Toyota Scion from a 29-year-old woman shortly after ditching the Saturn. Jenkins then lead officers on a high-speed chase through the city during which he ignored traffic signals and drove opposite of traffic.
The chase came to an end when Jenkins drove into Franklin Square Park and eventually came to a stop. He was pulled from the car by officers and taken into custody. He is being held on $750,000 bail.
The District Attorney’s Office on Saturday announced four sets of charges being brought against Jenkins following his rampage through the city. The charges include kidnapping, carjacking, criminal mischief, vandalism and assault.

The District Attorney’s office won’t do anything to stop this epidemic of carjacking in Philadelphia. Lawrence Krasner is one of the “progressive” District Attorneys elected with funding from billionaire George Soros. Krasner has implemented a “turn ’em loose” agenda that guarantees most criminals will be back on the streets within hours of their arrest.

Allowing criminals to terrorize Philadelphia is “social justice,” you see, and if anyone in Philly complains about Krasner’s pro-criminal agenda, these complaints are dismissed as right-wing racism.

Remember that Philadelphia rioted last October when police shot a black man, Walter Wallace Jr., who charged at them with a knife. This is what “social means” — black men have a right to stab police, because the knife-wielding criminal is a victim of “systemic racism.”

Walter Wallace Jr. had more than a dozen arrests on his record before he made the fatal mistake of bringing a knife to a gunfight last October. In any sane community, Wallace never would have been released from prison, but Philadelphia is not a sane community. Joe Biden got more than 80% of the vote in Philadelphia, and if you don’t think that is conclusive proof of insanity, I don’t know what will convince you.

Crazy People Are Dangerous and the madness in Philadelphia has had fatal consequences. Skylar Owens-Mooney was one of the victims.

Philadelphia police on Friday [Oct. 9, 2020] identified the 29-year-old man an officer fatally shot in Germantown early Thursday, and said it occurred after the man entered a church around 3 a.m. carrying an assault rifle, confronted a woman he knew who lived in the rectory there, and said he wanted to kill somebody.
The gunman, Stanley Cochran, then made a series of “bizarre” demands for nearly an hour before leaving the church, police said. What he did next cost two people their lives.
One of them, according to Lt. Jason Hendershot, of the unit that investigates police shootings, was 19-year-old Skylar Owen Mooney, who Hendershot said was fatally shot by Cochran when he tried to steal the car she was driving.
The other was Cochran, who Hendershot said had several confrontations with police officers while trying to run away from the area — refusing to drop his gun, firing at at least one officer, and at one point attempting to steal a police cruiser. . . .
Homicide Lt. Norman Davenport said Cochran was a suspect in a double slaying committed in West Oak Lane on Monday, but that police had not developed enough evidence to be sure that Cochran was the killer. . . .
Hendershot said Thursday’s events started when Cochran entered the rectory at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church carrying a rifle and confronting a woman who lived and worked there. Cochran named a person he wanted to kill and asked the woman to bring that person to him. The woman said she didn’t know who Cochran was talking about, Hendershot said.
Over the next 30 to 60 minutes, according to Hendershot, Cochran made a series of demands, telling the woman to give him food and money, and to drive him to Wawa. She declined.
Cochran ultimately fired a shot, missing the woman. But she dropped her car keys, and he stole her Kia Spectra and drove away, Hendershot said. He crashed near Chelten Avenue.
Cochran then approached a woman driving a black Volvo and told her to get out of the car, Hendershot said, causing her to speed away in reverse for several blocks. She saw police nearby and alerted them about Cochran.
Meanwhile, Hendershot said, Cochran fired shots at an Infiniti sedan being driven by Mooney. She was struck in the head, and later taken to Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia, where she was declared dead. . . .
Cochran, according to Hendershot, then encountered several police officers in different parts of Germantown as he attempted to flee. Police said he did not obey commands to put his gun down, and that four officers fired shots at him. Hendershot said Cochran fired at one of the officers and unsuccessfully tried to steal that cop’s patrol car.
After Cochran was shot, he was taken to Einstein, where he was pronounced dead at 4:36 a.m., Hendershot said.
Hendershot said a Mini Draco firearm was recovered at the scene; it was purchased in 2018 in Richmond, Va., but Hendershot said authorities were still investigating how Cochran — who has a criminal record and could not have legally owned the gun — obtained it.
Cochran had several convictions, according to court records, most recently a guilty plea in 2017 to firearms charges. He was sentenced to 11½ to 23 months in jail and five years probation, the records say. In February 2020, his probation was continued, according to the records, which do not provide additional details.
Davenport said homicide detectives received a call Thursday from someone who said Cochran was responsible for a double slaying Monday on the 6500 block of Lambert Street, where a 48-year-old woman and 29-year-old man were found fatally shot inside a house.

Did you catch that? Cochran was a career felon with “several convictions,” including weapons charges, and was prohibited from possessing firearms. Keep this in mind when Democrats try to pass gun-control legislation. Criminals don’t obey existing gun-control laws, and Democrats don’t want to put criminals in prison for violating those laws.

“Social justice” means that Stanley Cochran served less than two years for his most recent conviction, and was then turned loose on the streets of Philadelphia where he killed a 19-year-old woman. If the January numbers are any indication, there will be more than 700 carjackings in Philadelphia this year. How many more people will be killed by “social justice” in Philadelphia and other hellhole cities run by Democrats?




 

Family Demands Answers

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Whenever police kill a black criminal, it is now predictable — as night follows day — that the media will run a story about how the family of the deceased suspect “demands answers” about the shooting. Generally speaking, there will be a “civil rights” lawyer at the press conference, and there will eventually be a lawsuit against the cops. We take this for granted nowadays, along with the media interviewing relatives of the deceased criminal, who had an extensive felony record, saying that he was really a wonderful person, a beloved father, blah blah blah.

All of this is part of building up the Black Lives Matter narrative that law enforcement is about “systemic racism.” It is necessary to mention in this context that cops kill white criminals, too. In fact, the majority of suspects shot by cops are white, and sometimes the circumstances surrounding these shootings are tragic (e.g., Sage Crawford, shot in front of her small children after she charged cops with a knife), but cops shooting white people doesn’t become a 24/7 story on CNN, and nobody’s rioting over these cases. No, it is only black criminals getting shot by cops that get CNN saturation coverage, and we are not supposed to notice the upside-down values involved in this liberal media narrative, wherein everyone is expected to sympathize with lifelong criminals.

OK, but what happens when cops don’t kill criminals? What happens when fear of being accused of racism convinces people that it’s a good idea to turn criminals loose, just because they’re black?

The latest news from Chickasha, Oklahoma:

It’s been over one week since a four-year-old and her 67-year-old grandfather were stabbed to death inside their Chickasha home. All of it was allegedly by one of their own family members, 42-year-old Lawrence Anderson.
Monday night, investigators said that same family member may be responsible for a third murder.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations is still investigating the unfolding story in Chickasha, but the family of the third woman killed are demanding answers. They said they want to know why the man’s sentence was commuted in the first place.
“We’ve lost a part of our heart that we will never get back,” said Brooke Burris Wofford, a cousin of 41-year-old Andrea Blankenship, who was found dead in her Chickasha home.
Anderson was just released from prison in mid-January. He was out for less than three weeks on a commuted sentence when the crimes occurred.
Investigators said Anderson stabbed his uncle and 4-year-old Kaeos to death. However, the alleged spree didn’t end there. Detectives now believe Anderson also murdered Blankenship, who was found dead in her home on the same street as the first two murders.
“We need some more answers,” Burris Wofford said.
OSBI officials said on Thursday they now have evidence that Anderson killed Blankenship before he killed Leon Pye and Kaeos and stabbed Delci Pye.
Wofford said Blankenship was a single mother of two who lived alone and worked from home. She said the family is unaware of any relationship between her and her alleged killer.
“We want to know why this monster who is dangerous was released,” Wofford said.
Anderson was originally sentenced to prison in 2006 for attacking and pointing a gun at his girlfriend. He went back to prison in 2012 for selling crack cocaine near an elementary school. Anderson was sentenced again in 2017 for having a gun and sneaking drugs into jail. However, just three years later, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed off on a commuted sentence, which was granted by the state pardon and parole board. Anderson was released from prison for a third time on Jan. 18.
“Let us know the reasoning behind why he would release such a violent criminal,” Burris Wofford said.

He attacked his girlfriend and sold cocaine near an elementary school, but why he should be in prison? That’s “systemic racism”! No, let’s turn him loose, because what could possibly go wrong?

Why did the Republican governor of Oklahoma approve this commutation? Without bothering to research that question, my guess is that someone in the governor’s office decided it was a good idea to release inmates who were imprisoned for “non-violent” offenses. Selling cocaine near an elementary school? That qualifies as a “non-violent” crime. Nobody bothered to check whether Lawrence Anderson had any previous history of violence, and this is what happens when “social justice” replaces common sense as the guiding principle of law enforcement. That some Republicans are buying into this mentality should concern us.




 

The Death of ‘Teflon’

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Ramiro “Teflon” Carrasco began his life of crime at a young age, with a record dating back to 2003, the year he turned 14. In late June 2011, Carrasco was wanted on six active warrants, including failure to appear in court to face charges of fraud, domestic violence and probation violation, when police spotted him in Loveland, Colorado. Carrasco managed to elude police for two more days before he was finally arrested with the help of a SWAT team and a police K-9. Six years later, in February 2017, Carrasco was wanted on four outstanding warrants — including two felonies — when Loveland police tried to arrest him again, but he barricaded himself inside an apartment and once more, the SWAT team had to be called to take “Teflon” into custody.

You might think that a lifelong felon who had twice been the subject of SWAT interventions might have gotten a lengthy prison sentence. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, “Teflon” was a known gang member, whose face was covered with tattoos. Despite his felonious history, Carrasco was released from prison in Colorado in January 2019. His obituary was published 13 months later:

Ramiro Carrasco, a loving father, son, brother, uncle, cousin and friend. Ramiro left this world unexpectedly at 30 years young on Feb 26, 2020.

“Unexpectedly”? His death was actually quite predictable. The cause of death was three gunshot wounds from a Greeley police officer’s pistol.

At the time of his death, Carrasco was out on bond on charges in Larimer County. He also had an outstanding warrant in Boulder County. He and a woman named Keya Marie Pobanz (who had also done time in prison) had spent a few days smoking marijuana and methamphetamine. About 1 a.m. on February 26, 2020, Carrasco and Pobanz were in a green Honda in the parking lot of the Island Grove Village Apartments, “an affordable rental housing community” near a park on 14th Avenue in Greeley.

A police officer “was conducting crime suppression patrol” in the neighborhood, which was known “to be a high crime area specifically, narcotics and a dumping ground for stolen vehicles.” The officer spotted the Honda, which was “suspicious” because it did not have a front license tag and was backed into a parking space. Exiting his vehicle, the officer approached the Honda, and his bodycam video captured what happened:

 

Watching the video with an untrained eye, you might not realize why, at about the 42-second mark, the officer raises his pistol and orders Carrasco: “Stop moving. Put your hands up right now, dude.”

What happened? The officer shined his flashlight on Carrasco and saw he had a pistol on his lap. Carrasco moved his hand to try to conceal the pistol, and that’s when the officer drew his gun. A tense standoff followed for more than a minute, and the officer moved away from the car door for his own safety. Just about the time backup arrived, the officer saw Carrasco reach for the gun and BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Despite being hit with three shots, Carrasco still had the presence of mind to try to get rid of his gun — a Ruger .380 semi-auto — by tossing it out the open passenger door. You can actually hear it hit the pavement at about the 2:29 mark in the video. Despite this, Pobanz continued insisting that Carrasco did not have a weapon until the next day:

Pobanz told Commander Smith she was with Teflon for the last few days. During this time Teflon had told Pobanz he was not going back to prison as he has spent the better part of his life in prison. She didn’t know why he kept the gun lying on his lap as the officer approached. She said they knew the cop was going to contact them when he pulled into the lot, and she did not know why Teflon did not hide the gun prior to being contacted by the police.

Well, I think we all know the answer to that mystery. “Teflon” didn’t hide the gun because he wanted to have it handy, planning to shoot the cop and then try to escape. But the cop was smart, and when “Teflon” saw the backup police cars arriving, he made the only choice he had left.

Was he going to shoot, or was Carrasco reaching for the gun in a desperate last-minute attempt to hide it before more cops arrived?

It doesn’t matter, really. The shooting was justified because the officer had reasonable cause to believe his life was in danger. In releasing his report on the incident, the district attorney explained that he was not naming the police officer because of Carrasco’s “very strong and documented ties to known criminal gangs,” which could put the officer at risk of retaliation from Carrasco’s gang associates.

And that’s the story of how a career criminal “left this world unexpectedly.” His nickname was “Teflon.” But it wasn’t Kevlar.