“I feel like we relieve it every day,” Maurica Manyan’s cousin Leo Richards tells Inside Edition.
Family members of a Washington D.C. law-enforcement officer have spoken out after the tragic death of their relative.
A retired police lieutenant was leading a training session for four special officers assigned to the public library system. He had finished instruction on how to use a baton to take down unruly suspects when he and his audience posed for a class photo.
The instructor, Jesse Porter, 58, then moves away from the group and while turning pulls out his gun, which fired and hit 25-year-old mother Maurica Manyan in the chest.
The instructor reportedly said he thought the firearm in his holster was a “training gun,” not his loaded weapon. He and another officer gave Manyan CPR, but she did not make it.
Porter told authorities he was “taking a picture and joking around when he removed his firearm from his holster and then heard it discharge.”
Manyan’s heartbroken parents and her cousin, Leo Richards, say they are still coming to grips with her death.
“I feel like we relieve it every day,” Richards tells Inside Edition.
Porter pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to three years in prison.
“He should be spending ten years to life,” Richards says.
The family’s lawyer, Chelsea Lewis, says, “we were shocked. We were very disappointed. In our opinion it’s police privilege and for some reason that police privilege is not extending to Officer Manyon.”
