Authorities in New Mexico will not seek charges against three police officers involved in a fatal shooting after arriving at the wrong house last year.
Officers in the town of Farmington fired dozens of shots and killed Robert Dotson, 52, because he appeared at the door of his home holding a gun.
At the time, the officers were responding to a domestic violence call from a house across the street.
The Dotson family filed a lawsuit against the department last year.
According to a complaint filed by the family in court, police arrived at the Dotson residence late on 5 April, 2023 and “parked down the street and did not have their lights on”.
When Mr Dotson opened his front door holding a weapon, police immediately opened fire, striking him 12 times. Another 19 shots were fired at his wife Kimberly, who was unharmed during the incident. Police later said she opened fire on officers with a pistol.
I can do you better. There was a high profile police, er, “shooting” in my town back in the early 2000’s that made front page in the papers because four cops fired 204 shots at some guys – for those keeping score at home, that’s four Barney Fifes with three complete magazines, two reloads each out of their issued Glock 17’s – and hit no one.
So they succeeded in doing nothing but putting holes in a bunch of people’s cars, a couple of rowhouses, lampposts, mailboxes, etc., and failed to even so much as wing any of the multiple alleged perps. I mean, they didn’t manage to nail any innocent bystanders or people sleeping in their beds or anything for once, either. Ludicrous levels of wanton and irresponsible property damage and potential injury or death dealt to anyone within a radius of who knows how many blocks, not a single care given, for no benefit whatsoever. You know, just business as usual.
To this day I wonder if there actually were any perps, or if some cops just decided they wanted to shoot up a poor inner city neighborhood for yuks and get away with it.
Something similar happened in NYC except the cops hit a ton of bystanders and then charged the suspect for it as if he’d done it himself.