Body cam footage has been released of Salt Lake City officers shooting a 13-year-old Autistic boy after his mother called for help, saying he was experience a mental health episode.
Body cam footage has been released of Salt Lake City officers shooting a 13-year-old autistic boy after his mother called for help, saying he was experience a mental health episode. The video, made public Monday by the police department, shows the boy walking slowly while apparently failing to respond to shouts that he get on the ground. He is seen falling to the sidewalk after 11 shots are heard.
“Show me your hands!” an officer is heard screaming after Linden Cameron drops to the ground.
“I don’t feel good,” the boy says. “Tell my mom I love her.”
The mother, Golda Barton, called 911 on Sept. 4 and asked for a mental health officer, telling dispatchers her son was “out of control” and needed to go to a hospital for psychiatric treatment.
In the footage, Barton tells an officer, “We need him to go to the hospital,” according to bodycam video. “I need him to go to a hospital. I can’t get him to get there on my own. And I cannot do this every night.”
Barton tells police her son is afraid of police, doesn’t like them and will most likely run away. “He sees a badge and he automatically thinks, like, you’re going to kill him or he has to defend himself,” the mother says.
She says the boy can be violent and had earlier threatened her co-worker and could have something that looks like a weapon. An officer says police would have act as if he did have one.
The responding officers are heard discussing whether they should try to apprehend him.
A female officer asks why they should “approach” Linden’s home for a “psych problem.”
“We could call sergeant,” she said, according to the body camera footage. “And tell him the situation. Because I’m not about to get in a shooting because he’s upset.”
Another officer says, “Especially when he hates cops, it’s going to end in a shooting.”
Officers are seen chasing him in the dark and breaking through a wooden fence before an officer tells him to show his hands, and then fires 11 rounds.
The boy remains hospitalized with extensive gunshot injuries to his shoulder, both ankles, intestines and bladder. A GoFundMe account to help with medical costs had raised more than $90,000 as of Tuesday.
The footage was released during a five-minute press conference, during which no questions were taken from reporters.
Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said she was upset by the shooting, as the mother of a 14-year-old boy. She called for a swift and thorough investigation into the incident.
“I am profoundly heartbroken and frustrated,” she said. “It’s a tragedy for this young boy, for his mother and for families and individuals who have acute mental health needs.”
RELATED STORIES
