An non-verbal autistic 17-year-old boy with cerebral palsy named Victor Perez was having an episode. He was outside on his yard on the ground holding a long kitchen butcher knife. His mother was trying to get the knife from the boy, who waved it about while still on the ground, nowhere near the mother.
Neighbors who were filming the incident called 911, asking the police to come to de-escalate the situation. In the span of twenty seconds, the police arrive, jump out of their vehicles with handguns and rifles drawn, yelling at the boy to drop his knife as they approached the four-foot-tall chain-link fence separating them from the boy on the ground, twelve to fifteen feet behind the fence. When the boy stands up and moves toward the fence, they all open fire.
WARNING, snuff film ahead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdLnFSQNkMM
From behind the chain-link fence. The boy never even made it halfway to the fence, much less had any chance as a kid with cerebral palsy to hop it in a single bound and plunge a knife through the Kevlar body armor being worn by four police officers. Because they heard there was a drunk Mexican with a knife.
In addition to the devastated family are the devastated neighbors who called 911. These are white folks in a white city who are culturally inculcated in the reverence and respect for police. Their communities haven’t been rocked week after week, city after city, year after year with their young men turned into hashtags. They don’t know not to call the cops in situations better handled by social workers. They really thought they were doing the right thing.
“He (Victor) was having a really bad day with mental issues, but he wasn’t chasing anybody, and everybody could easily get out of the reach of his knife,” said Brad Andres, who shot the initial video. “So this wasn’t a really dangerous situation. The police were more called to come in and help the family deescalate and get it under control. This is the biggest tragedy. I witnessed it, and it was really tough on me and my son to watch that. I just want to send out my deepest sympathies to the family, and we were trying to help you. We weren’t trying to bring a firing squad down to Harrison Street.” (emphasis mine)
The police are trying to justify their trigger-happy shoot-first-ask-no-questions behavior by saying everything happens in a split second, that those cops make sudden life-or-death decisions, and that the suspect had a weapon and they had no way of knowing his condition (the 911 callers said the boy “appeared drunk” and everyone involved was speaking Spanish).
I’m reminded of John Witherspoon’s quote in the 1995 movie “Friday”: “You kids today ain’t nothing but punks. Sissified. So quick to pick up a gun. You scared to take an ass whipping.” The punk kids today are the Pocatello cops. So terrified that the four of them with tasers and Billy clubs and wearing body armor would take an ass whipping from a teenager with a knife that they had to quickly pick up a gun.
UPDATE: Victor Perez, age 17, showing no signs of brain activity, was taken off life support and died on April 12th, 2025.
