Although Booker Pannell’s Hands Were Empty, Deluded Elk Grove Cops Hallucinate That He Had a Gun and Stood Back Instead of Immediately Arresting Him. Cops Then Fatally Shot Him in the Back as He Fled
/From [HERE] Newly released bodycam footage shows that Booker T. Pannell III put his hands up and said, “Please, please, I don’t want to die” before Elk Grove police officers chased him down a hotel hallway and shot him Feb. 21. Pannell was pronounced dead at a hospital later that night. He was a 40 year old Black man. All the cops involved were white.
The Elk Grove Police Department on Friday night released footage from body-worn cameras and a hotel security camera. An investigation into the officers’ use of force is ongoing.
Pannell died during a continued local and national reckoning with policing practices fueled by fatal encounters with law enforcement. Mapping Police Violence and local news coverage show that police killed six people in use of force incidents in Sacramento County last year. Internal and outside investigators have not determined whether officers followed proper protocols the night Pannell died.
According to the video, someone called police Feb. 21 to report a carjacking near Shana Way and Whitelock Parkway. Dispatch received the report at 10:32. An officer went to the house to take a statement from the husband. The husband, a so-called friend of Pannells, told the cops that he made felony threats to kill him and fled with their car. He told the officer, “I thought he was gonna kill me.”
Around 11:40 p.m., the video says, officers went to the Holiday Inn Express on Stockton Boulevard and Laguna Boulevard, right off Highway 99. A hotel employee had reported a disturbance. A very short clip of security footage from the Holiday Inn shows a man in the lobby leaning over the front desk; that footage has no audio. When police arrived, they saw the car that had been reported stolen sitting empty in the Holiday Inn parking lot. They determined Pannell was the man in the lobby.
In the video, four officers walk through the automatic sliding doors of the lobby and three immediately raise their guns. One holsters her weapon and switches to a taser.
Body-worn camera footage shows the officers shouting at Pannell: “Hands up.” He puts his hands up.
Multiple officers then yell, “Get on the ground” multiple times, and one of the officers directs them, “One person talk.”
Although his hands are up, he appears to be surrendering and his hands are empty, the cops nevertheless stand 15-20 feet away from him and fail to approach him to apprehend him - as if they see a gun that is not there. With his hands up the cops did not face an imminent threat to their lives or grievous bodily harm.
A female officer shouts, “You will be tased; get on the ground.” TASER FIRED, THEN SHOTS Multiple officers shout more commands at Pannell. He keeps his hands stiffly raised out in front of him.
Pannell says, “I don’t want to die. Please, please. I don’t want to die. Listen, please. Please.”
In response, the female officer shouts, “Taser, taser, taser,” and deploys it.
The interaction from the moment that the sliding door opened to the moment that the officer deployed her taser lasted 35 seconds. It’s unclear whether the taser actually hit Pannell. In the video, he runs away from the officers and they chase him down a hallway.
An officer fires his weapon five times down the hotel hallway. “Stop moving!” one officer shouts down the hallway. Outside the exit door, which has shattered glass likely caused by the gunfire, a bystander and Pannell are lying on the ground.
Officers shout, “Let me see your hands! Hands!” Pannell’s corpse is lying on the ground, a few feet farther away.
When the officers approach Pannell, they see that he has two gunshot wounds — in the leg and the head.
In an edited video as a male officer holds one of Pannell’s arms, the female officer takes away a gun they claim was Pannell’s but its not clear where the gun was.
The Elk Grove Police Department said it released the [edited] video before the investigation into the incident was concluded “in the interest of transparency with the community we serve.” They published the video on YouTube Friday evening.
