Florida Cop Shoots and Kills Man Mid-Sentence for Refusing To Drop an Axe

Newly launched body-camera footage seems to point out an unidentified Jacksonville, Florida, Sheriff’s Office law-enforcement officer capturing and killing a person holding an axe after refusing an order to place it down and trying to speak to the officer.

The capturing occurred in Jacksonville final April. According to First Coast News, police have been referred to as out by a report of a “mentally ill” man chopping energy to individuals’s houses and vandalizing them. Body digital camera footage exhibits an officer encountering Kevin Mahan, 43, on a property, standing behind some bushes. He was holding an axe, however seemingly alone and not threatening anyone. The officer approaches and orders Mahan a number of occasions to drop the axe, however Mahan refuses, trying to speak to the officer.

The officer has his gun drawn and skilled on Mahan however retains a secure distance. After the fourth demand that Mahan drop the axe, Mahan holds the axe up and begins saying, “Man, listen, bro … ,” and then the officer instantly shoots him. Mahan died. While he did maintain up the axe, it did not seem he was doing in order a risk and was anyway a lot too removed from the officer to swing it at him.

Mahan does have a lengthy history of encounters with the law, together with convictions for armed theft and was beforehand sentenced to jail after a conviction of being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was arrested a yr in the past after an alleged trying carjacking incident and pleaded no contest to resisting arrest. He served 30 days in jail.

The officer was positioned on administrative go away through the investigation, however First Coast News reviews that he’s now again on the job. The physique digital camera footage was launched on Friday. First Coast News turned to a retired former officer, Kim Varner, from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, who defined the alternate options the officer might have taken. He might have waited for backup. He might have continued the dialog, since Mahan was clearly not truly approaching or threatening the officer.

“Why not talk to the guy?” Varner requested. “‘Drop the axe!’ ain’t talking to him.”

It is, nonetheless, an instance of how some cops habitually strategy these conditions, prioritizing compliance over the rest—even when it truly escalates the potential for violence and even when coping with individuals whose psychological schools are suspect.

There’s an extra insult as effectively. The cause the officer has not been recognized is as a result of he has sought and acquired anonymity underneath Florida’s Marsy’s Law. This regulation, a state constitutional modification handed by voters in 2018, was bought as a “victim’s rights” invoice that was meant to verify crime victims have been entitled to sure protections and rights throughout court docket circumstances, together with safety from “the disclosure of information or records that could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family, or which could disclose confidential or privileged information of the victim.”

In actuality, Florida’s Marsy’s Law is written so vaguely that cops are utilizing the regulation to forestall their names from being publicly launched by declaring that they are “crime victims” after they have violent confrontations as a part of their job. And in 2021, a Florida appeals court docket agreed, figuring out that the regulation may be invoked by cops to hide their names from the general public, a blow in opposition to regulation enforcement transparency and accountability. Florida’s Supreme Court just heard arguments earlier this month to find out whether or not utilizing Marsy’s Law to defend cops’ identities violates the state structure’s guidelines for public data.

Regardless, whereas individuals could moderately debate whether or not the officer’s capturing of Mahan was justified underneath the regulation, no affordable particular person would watch that physique digital camera footage and conclude that the regulation enforcement officer was a “victim” of any crime.