Sgt. Daniel Perry charged with murder for shooting an Austin protestor
Here are some of the facts of the case:
Sgt. Daniel Perry, a soldier in the US Army, has been charged with murder after killing a BLM protester last summer. This happened during the months of violence and destruction that occurred last year following George Floyd’s death. Cities across the nation were inundated with demonstrations, many of which devolved into rioting.
But Perry didn’t just suddenly shoot a random protestor. He was being mobbed and potentially attacked:
Perry was making extra money by driving for a ride-sharing service at the time. After dropping off a fare, he turned onto a street that was being blocked by what was ostensibly a protest. When he attempted to make his way through, people surrounded his car, beating on it. That’s when Garrett Foster approached him with an AK-variant rifle, pointed it at him, and demanded the window be rolled down. At that point, Perry feared for his life and discharged his firearm in what he felt was self-defense.
There is video that shows the scene, confirming that the car was, in fact, mobbed.
So it doesn’t seem as though there was any way for Perry to retreat from the threat without mowing down some other protestors with his car. This is from Perry’s attorney:
“Sgt. Perry again simply asks that anybody who might want to engage in a hindsight review of this incident picture themselves trapped in a car as a masked stranger raises an AK-47 in their direction and reflect upon what they might have done,” Perry’s lawyer, Clint Broden, said in a statement provided to the Austin American-Statesman.
This is Texas, too – but it’s Austin, Texas, which is a special case.
It is noteworthy that this particular BLM protester was white (with a disabled black fiancée), so the case cannot really be racialized in what is now, all too predictably, the fashion of “woke” hyper-partisan pseudo-journalists. Curiously, one week ago, the Portland PD rushed to disseminate the fact that the victim in a cop-involved shooting was white, in order that the local Antifa/BLM rabble not be enraged.
It takes a year to decide to press forward with murder charges, when the shooter was very open about what he had done. IIRC, he notified the police about the shooting,right after he did it. Sounds rather fishy.
Regarding racial angles to the Austin BLM protests, there is a video of a black guy getting out of his car on a feeder road to I-35 to inform the protesters blocking the road that they are preventing him from getting to work.
It’s another Rittenhouse indictment. Liberals are unfit to work as prosecutors.
The 4th Amendment reasonableness test (the Graham factors) need to be adjusted wrt uses of force during mass protest and take into account the immediate threat posed by the crowd as well as by the suspect. Note that this would not affect the analysis in the Ashli Babbit case since the crowd was still behind a wall (along with some cops) when she was shot and killed while unarmed.
No way a jury or judge can honestly find this to be anything other than a clearcut case of fully justified self-defense.
As soon as that AK-variant rifle was intentionally pointed at him and held in that position, Sgt. Perry had a reasonable expectation that his life was in mortal peril. In that moment, firing in self-defense was the only certain method available to Sgt. Perry for ending that mortal threat.
But this has ramifications far beyond a DA with a political agenda. If Perry is found guilty of murder, America’s ‘justice’ system is declaring that we now have no right to life itself.
The left is terribly miscalculating. A conviction of Sgt Perry will “cut both ways”. For if we do not have a right to life, then neither do they…
So what’s the purpose in even charging Sgt. Perry?
Intimidation of anyone who might physically oppose America’s new Red Guards.
Proper response if Perry is convicted? They’ll have called the tune, make them pay the piper and… don’t get caught.
No patriot wants a civil war but it only takes one side to make war and the left is making war upon America.
Geoffrey Britain:
I believe the prosecution will contend that the rifle was never pointed at him.
The Daily Mail has an enlarged photo showing Foster standing by the car with the barrel pointing down at an angle, but his shoulder is raised and engaged. Hard to say what happened in the next few seconds.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8563675/Wheelchair-bound-fianc-e-slain-BLM-protester-leads-vigil-Austin.html
Can any police officer get a real fair trial that won’t become a kangaroo court?
GB: “Proper response if Perry is convicted?”
My friends say there’s an old bit of advice: shoot, shovel, shut up.
Prosecuting citizens for limited and restrained self-defense is a violent shove in the direction of war, and argues for less restraint when those circumstances are repeated. Such prosecution transforms woke mobs into enemy combatants.
We are on notice that society will not protect us. We have nothing to lose.
And your average Democrat friends will lap it all up. Seriously, after yelling “ defund the police”, the Democrats are starting to push the narrative that Republicans want to “ defund the police”. Just like they spent 4 years claiming Trump was not legitametly elected, then they turned on a dime and claimed that questioning an election was an “ attack on Democracy.”. They yelled “ revolution” all last summer, then claimed it was the right that was staging an insurrection. Now, the Democrats are starting to say there is no real increase in crime. Never mind the “ increase in gun violence…hate crimes against asians…etc” that they have been pushing.
We live in the book 1984.
Face it. Your average Democrat is either stupid or evil.
I can only hope the people in the middle wake up.
That DA must be a piece of communist trash. I despise these communist scumbags more and more…..
If you want to see what this DA is up to, go his web page. Apparently one of his main functions in life is to prosecute cops. This is the June 4 th press release. Its all about multiple Grand Jury Indictments against Cops. Multiple indictments in one month against multiple cops. https://www.traviscountytx.gov/images/district_attorney/docs/Press_Releases/2021/Case_Summaries_June_4.pdf
Anarchy-tyranny. Scumbag Democrat base surrounds your car, threatens you with a weapon. You defend yourself. Democrat suit summons jury of woketard Democrats. You get prosecuted by Democrats.
They are scum of the Earth.
“I can only hope the people in the middle wake up.”
Maybe some will, but if they were they’d be awake by now.
Consider that it’s you. Just you. No one else is coming to help.
JimNorCal,
Reading comments on various Twitter feeds does give me some hope that in two areas the Democrats have overplayed. One is in the Transgender “ women” in Women’s sports and the other is the Democrat’s claims about crime.
Last summer I met a friend of a friend on FB that was leaving the Democrats ,in part , because she realized the “ mostly peaceful demonstrations” the media was claiming were false based on videos being posted to social media.
How rare is that “ changer” story? Was she basically a conservative all along?
The lying media is the biggest obstacle for those in the middle.
Reason, the libertarian website, has an article on the shooting titled:
–Zuri Davis, “The Libertarian Party Mourns Garrett Foster, Activist Killed at a Black Lives Matter Protest”
https://reason.com/2020/07/27/the-libertarian-party-mourns-garrett-foster-activist-killed-at-a-black-lives-matter-protest/
Foster considered himself a Libertarian. In the Reason credits, Zuri Davis, the article author, celebrates herself as “Catholic/Black/Feminist/pluviophile.” The latter being a “lover of rain.”
Her article on the shooting is … questionable. She gets ratio’d in the comments with most of her support coming from trolls.
One thing I learned from the comments is that Foster had his rifle at “low ready.” I didn’t know the term, but it was clear from the photo that his rifle wasn’t casually slung over his shoulder.
Foster was at the protest with his quad amputee fiance. (She had had a urinary infection which went septic and lost her limbs below the the knees and elbows.) He was pushing her wheelchair around and carrying his AK rifle. They attended these protests regularly.
Foster was interviewed that night by someone livestreaming. Foster was asked if he felt he would have to use his rifle:
_____________________________________
Nah, I mean, if I use it against the cops I’m dead. I think all the people that hate us and want to say shit to us are too big of p-ssies to stop and actually do anything about it.
https://thespectator.info/2020/07/26/people-who-hate-us-are-too-big-of-p-ssies-to-actually-do-anything-about-it/
_____________________________________
Mr. Foster sounds like a complicated young man.
In spite of my angry rants earlier, today I had a really good experience with a total stranger. I was in McDonalds getting lunch and this older black guy comes in wearing a “Thin Blue Line” Police Flag shirt and a US Army Ball cap. I waited till he finished giving his order and then stepped up and handed the cashier a $20 bill and said I was paying for the man’s meal. I told him he was a brave man to be wearing that shirt and that I had served in the National Guard, with a couple of active duty tours. He had been in Vietnam.
I relayed to him how last summer, on more than one occasion when I was getting very upset about the events going on, a black person had stepped up to do something for me. One was when I was driving down the road and a car from the group foster home that I used to volunteer at was beside me in the road. Two of the kids , one black, one hispanic, recognized me , along with the staff, and started waving very energetically at me, all smiles. Another time a black man in the vehicle in front of me at a drive thru paid for my meal.
The older black man I talked to today spoke about real discrimination in the past that he had seen.
Without ever specifically mentioning any specific group, his comment was that what was going on today is all a lie , meant to divide us.
Turned out, not surprisingly, that this guy had worked for the sheriff’s Department in some capacity in the past and was a pastor.
He knew the pastor at my church and we also had a mutual tie via another black pastor I had worked with at the foster home.
jon baker:
Lovely story.
I think there is much good will remaining in our nation. Not to be forgotten.
Despite “Texas”, Austin is a liberal hell-hole, being both the state capital AND a “college town” (UTex).
None of this is any surprise, though clearly, and always, a disappointment.
Used be, a masked man with gun forcing traffic to stop would be treated as a highwayman and shot on the spot.
Were Perry dead and Foster the shooter, I doubt that any charge of this seriousness would be brought.
The longer-range problem for the country is how many people agree with me, and find it disturbing. And how many people would find it an appropriate result. I strongly suspect the latter group consist of a non-trivial number.
I can hardly stop myself from putting the latters’ excuses into their mouths before I talk to them about anything.
BTW — reading the Daily Mail piece…
“Mitchell – who had all four of her limbs amputated in 2010 after contracting a mystery virus ”
A bit of a difference in description between that and “A UTI”…
SMH.
neo,
Yes, in order to sustain a charge of murder, the DA has to claim that self-defense was not involved.
However, Perry had to assume that Foster’s rifle was loaded. Foster ordered Perry out of his car and had the rifle in the ready position. That’s an implied threat and, if Perry refused Foster’s order and waited to see if Foster would point the rifle at him, he would have been placing his life at much greater risk.
Also, why tell Perry to get out of his car, since Perry just wanted to continue down a public thoroughfare?
We don’t know if Foster started to raise his rifle or if he then pointed it at Perry. We do know that none of the “mostly peaceful” demonstrators witness testimony can be trusted.
We also know that when your life is threatened, you can’t afford to wait until the aggressor is shooting at you.
Foster had a rifle he could easily raise in a split second to a firing position. In ordering Perry out of his car to be surrounded by a hostile mob… had but one response to remove the threat. Foster’s stupidity brought his fate upon him.
Being surrounded by a mob that is threatening you brings “disparity of force” into the self defense argument even if the mob has no weapons as such. Deadly force is permitted to be used in such a situation if a “reasonable man” would believe his life was endangered.
Also under Texas law you can use deadly force to prevent the forcible entry into your vehicle or forcible removable of yourself or another from a vehicle.
That said, what this prosecutor is apparently doing is using the idea that Perry, by driving his car into the “protest,” is the aggressor and any action taken by those at the “protest” is thus to be viewed as in self-defense. In the Travis county jurisdiction he may be able to sustain this view and obtain a conviction.