FBI won't assist in probe of Texas football player's death
ARLINGTON, Texas -- The FBI says it will not join the investigation of a North Texas police officer's shooting of an unarmed teenage burglary suspect by police gunfire.
FBI Dallas spokeswoman Allison Mahan said Monday that the agency "has full confidence in the ability" of Arlington police and local prosecutors to investigate what happened in the Friday death of 19-year-old Christian Taylor.
Previously during a news conference Saturday night, Arlington Police Chief Will Johnson had said a special FBI agent in charge of the Dallas field office would take part in the probe. He stressed it "in no way diminishes my confidence" in local officers to conduct the investigation.
Taylor, who was unarmed, was fatally shot early Friday morning after police responded to a burglary call at a car dealership in the Dallas suburb of Arlington. Security footage shows the 19-year-old breaking into a car in the lot and then crashing his own vehicle into the glass showroom. Police have said he refused to surrender and then tried to escape before the officer shot him.
The footage from the lot showed Taylor parking outside a gate and walking onto the lot. After breaking out the windshield of a vehicle on the lot, he returns to his own vehicle, driving it through the gate and then into the glass showroom.
Mahan said the FBI would likely join the case "if in the course of the investigation, information comes to light of a potential civil rights violation."
Arlington officer Brad Miller was placed on administrative leave after the early Friday shooting. Police say the officer had never before fired his weapon in the line of duty. CBS Dallas reports that on Monday detectives finished interviewing him.
Arlington police Lt. Christopher Cook said the department can't yet offer details on the confrontation between Taylor and a police trainee because investigators haven't completed all of their interviews. He said when the interviews are completed, details will be disclosed to the public at a news conference.
Cook also said that they are in contact with the family of the Angelo State sophomore football player, who was killed early Friday by officers answering a burglary call.
The brother of Taylor says he's not angry at police, but does think they could have handled the confrontation differently.
Joshua Taylor insists his brother "wouldn't attack any officer or anybody in authority." He says it's never OK to harm an unarmed person.
Taylor's father, Adrian Taylor, told CBS Dallas he didn't know why Christian would have been at the car dealership at that time of night.
"You know, it could have been too much drinking, he could have been wrong place at the wrong time, he could have gotten something and he didn't know what he was getting," Adrian Taylor said. "I don't know."
Regardless of his son's behavior, Adrian Taylor said Miller should not have shot him.
"What he was doing ain't no way right," he said. "But to shoot an unarmed man? And you're trained to take down men with your hands, with Taser, with your club and you shoot to kill?"
Adrian Taylor described Christian as "just a good dude" who would give the shoes off his feet to someone in need.
A newly released recording of radio traffic shows more than two minutes elapsed between the time police officers spotted Taylor at the Arlington car dealership and the moment a police officer fatally shot him.
The Arlington Police Department says it posted the 16-minute audio Monday on YouTube to counter an audio posted by an online blog that a department statement says "grossly misrepresents the facts and makes a false claim that Mr. Christian Taylor was shot in less than 1 second after APD Officers made contact with him."
The police statement says the recording posted on the blog "relied upon and published was not official audio provided by the department and had segments of time removed."
The statement says the official recording details the event sequence "in real-time with no segments of time removed."