top
California
California
Indybay
Indybay
Indybay
Regions
Indybay Regions North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area California United States International Americas Haiti Iraq Palestine Afghanistan
Topics
Newswire
Features
From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

Fullerton Police Cheif, D.A. Cover Up Kelly Thomas Death from Police Beating

by Witness Suppressed by D.A.
The death of homeless man Kelly Thomas at the hands of Fullerton police following a severe beating remains "uncertain", according to the Orange County coroner. When a human is beaten into a coma by a gang of cops and then dies only a few days later in the hospital, we can only "guess" at what happened (DUH!). However, it appears that the Orange County D.A. investigator Stan Berry is close friends with Fullerton police chief Sellers, this could explain the "uncertainty" coming from the OC coroner and the D.A's failure to contact eyewitnesses present when Kelly Thomas was beaten by Fullerton police.
"We may have figured out why it took the District Attorney investigators three weeks to start talking to witnesses on the Kelly Thomas police beating case…

According to this unsigned note that just came in to our website, Chief Sellers is a close personal friend of DA investigator Stan Berry, who was immediately assigned to the high-profile Fullerton case:

I suggest you check into the connection between Investigator Berry and FPD Chief Sellers. Sellers hired Berry when he was the Chief at Seal Beach PD. Sellers and his wife Rita Fraser-Sellers, are close personal friends with Berry and his wife, Kristen Berry, the Dispatch Supervisor in Seal Beach. They socialize together, vacation together and entertain each other in their respective homes.

Of all the DA investigators, why choose Berry, other than he will help cover for his friend.

Presumably that case assignment was a decision made by the DA Tony Rackauckas. I have confirmed that Berry worked as an investigator under Chief Sellers for the Seal Beach Police Department.

As for as the familial socializing, entertaining and vacationing together…maybe the Chief can clear that one up for us.

If our informant is correct, this would be a huge conflict of interest in a very high-profile investigation.

Notable claims:
•One officer supposedly beat Kelly Thomas with the butt of his Taser until blood started coming up all over the officer’s arms and hands.
•Another officer supposedly drop knees Kelly Thomas’ nose and throat with the full force of his body weight multiple times, crushing the victim’s throat.
•This happened while Kelly Thomas was not moving or resisting.

I’ve just heard from Mark Turgeon, an eye witness in the Kelly Thomas police beating death that he has NOT been contacted by the Orange County District Attorney’s office. You may remember that the District Attorney is supposed to be investigating the horrific incident.

Since the event happened almost three weeks ago, this is rather disturbing. This individual was immediately questioned by Fullerton police so there is no reason that the DA doesn’t have the ability to follow up with a crucial witness.

You may remember that the Coroner has already said that the cause of death is uncertain.

So what gives?"

details here;
http://www.fullertonsfuture.org/tag/kelly-thomas-beating/


"A video has surfaced that documents Fullerton police beating a homeless man near the Fullerton Bus Depot in early July, reports Gawker. The video above does not show much of the fight, but you can hear a man's screams and people talking about a Taser. The man being beaten also cries out for his father.

On July 5, Fullerton police received reports of someone breaking into cars in the area around the bus depot, according to the LA Times. Police subsequently tried to arrest 37-year-old transient Kelly Thomas on suspicion of possessing the stolen items.

When Thomas resisted, it took several minutes for him to be subdued. Sgt. Andrew Goodrich told the OC Register that it took "an upwards of five, maybe six officers to subdue him."

ABC says that Thomas was unarmed during the incident. Thomas sustained severe injuries to the head and neck, as evidenced in the photo here (WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC). He was hospitalized at UCI Medical Center, when he fell into a coma and died less than a week later.

Thomas' father Ron Thomas told the OC Register that his son had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early twenties and was homeless by choice. His sister, Christina Kinser, described him as a "quiet, gentle soul" to Fullerton Stories.

Currently, the Fullerton Police Department is performing an inquiry into the incident, and the case is being examined by the Orange County District Attorney's office, reports the LA Times. There have been several protests, and a vigil for Kelly was held in downtown Fullerton, the OC Register tells us.

In an open letter, City Council Member Bruce Whitaker has called for the police to offer a clear explanation and to release a video that apparently shows the actual beating."

article here;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/police-beat-homeless-full_n_911419.html


Personal comment;

We the people employ the police to "serve and protect", so then what good are the police if the end result is severe beatings of homeless people that result in coma and death. Who will protect people from those who are employed to protect the people?

As a previous job i worked in a psychiatric hospital as a psychiatric technician (aka orderly), and frequently we needed to restrain mentally ill clients who were a "danger to themselves or others". In many cases this was true and some restraint was needed. However, even when we were short staffed, we NEVER EVER BEAT THE MENTALLY ILL CLIENTS WHILE RESTRAINING THEM!!!

So how is it that only four poorly trained psych techs can manage to restrain large and strong schizophrenics WITHOUT CAUSING HARM TO THEM (or ourselves) while five or six well trained police officers manage to BEAT A MUCH SMALLER WEAKER MENTALLY ILL HOMELESS MAN TO DEATH??!!

INCOMPETENCE AND WILLFUL IGNORANCE WITH A SEVERE STREAK OF SADISM!!

This sort of behavior by the Fullerton police officers who attacked and beat Kelly Thomas to death shows that they lack basic understanding of their job requirement and should NEVER BE EMPLOYED AS POLICE AGAIN!! Nor should they work in any "direct contact" job such as detention, psych hospitals or prisons. This overkill beating of Kelly Thomas exposes these individual Fullerton police officers as sadists in the worst form, using the power of their uniform to brutally beat the life out of a mentally ill homeless man. If i were the "head cracker in charge", i would call for Old Testament style retribution and lay these individual Fullerton police thugs responsible for the beating to rest myself. I'll answer to God alone for my actions!

Why can't police officers learn to use the baskethold technique we learned in one day during our two week training to become psych techs? Really it isn't that hard, with five or six officers present there is NO EXCUSE not to use these usually safe techniques. Since Kelly Thomas was a human and not an octopus, it follows that he only had four limbs. That means one officer holds down each limb until he calms down, and the fifth officer holds his head to prevent him from banging his head. That is the procedure we followed in the psych hospital to prevent injuries to staff AND clients. Really folks, this isn't rocket science and there is no reason on Earth that Kelly Thomas needed to be beaten to death by these police thugs.

There are and will be more mentally ill homeless in our society as cultural isolation leads to increasing symptoms of paranoia and depression. Our society is structured towards isolation, and this feeds into the development of mental illness, especially in the homeless population. So the police in Fullerton and elsewhere will regularly encounter the mentally ill in growing numbers. Why not take a few weeks extra and train the police to use safe restraint techniques as we learned as psych techs? Why are police unable or unwilling to recognize that proper restraint techniques do NOT involve beating someone to death!?
Add Your Comments

Comments (Hide Comments)
by l. salazar
Msg. to any of the guilty LE involved in this case. A pox upon all your houses. I relish the spectacle of watching those pigs being torn to shreds & then fed to the dogs.

by LanceThruster
I hope it serves to prevent cover-up by city officials.
by Tom Kohler
"Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment ... unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares?"

~Murray Rothbard
Austrian economist and founder of modern Libertarianism
http://www.lewrockwell.com​/rothbard/ir/Ch5.html
by socalhunter
California has become a police state. To bad for our children!
by Joseph Zrnchik


The Media as a Tyranny Enabler

"Killing someone in the commission of felony is murder."



The mainstream media is chock full of news articles attempting to mitigate the murder of Kelly Thomas, a 140-pound malnourished mentally ill man who ran from police. Before it was over six officers were on the scene and the 140 pound man ended up brain-dead looking looked like this before his grieving father had him disconnected from life support. (Picture Omitted)

What was Kelly Thomas’s crime to be beat so savagely by police you ask? An officer thought he might have broke into a car. There were no witnesses to any crime, Kelly Thomas was merely a suspect. When the officer told him to halt, Kelly Thomas engaged in the capital offense of “Fleeing Law Enforcement”.

So, as six two-hundred pound law enforcement agents arrived at the scene, Kelly Thomas was placed face down after being tasered five times and was beat with flashlights until unconscious. After that the officers kept yelling, “Don’t resist. Stop resisting.” as they repeatedly dropped their weight on the back of the unconscious man’s head smashing his face into the pavement over and over again.

Kelly Thomas was described as a peaceful person despite his mental illness. He had never been charged with a violent crime. He was a loving person by all accounts. His family photos showed he was greatly loved by his family.

Now the mainstream media, the one that seeks to keep Americans subservient to the corporate/government tyrannies, has dealt every trump card in its stacked deck to excuse this murder to attempt to bolster the state's credibility and hide the extent that our police state seeks to stomp faces into the ground forever.

The first story I read was about how all the politicians and town functionaries are now working to develop national legislation to be able to involuntarily commit or retain mental patients to institutions while they may no longer be suffering any episode. As they smashed an unconscious man’s face into the concrete until he was brain dead, the media wants to make it look as if this murder by police was the fault of Kelly Thomas not receiving proper psychological care and not due to criminality on the part of police.

The fact of the matter is that there are people in uniform who are sadists and think beating those who resist or even disrespect law enforcement is a sport. I was a member of the Military Police Corps as a commissioned officer in the National Guard. I knew law enforcement officers from the FBI, ATF, DEA and other federal police agencies, numerous state police, several county police offices and officers from dozens of municipalities.

They all laughed and bragged about how they beat people, tortured people, handcuffed people to radiators and charged guys with crimes when they smarted off. They laughed about prison rape and thought it was a great way of meting out their brand of justice. The abuses of law enforcement and the authoritarian state is nothing new, but it has gotten progressively worse and is beginning to fuel uprisings across the globe. In short, police and government lawlessness of the type in which the district attorney had already cleared the police of second degree murder, has invited anarchy of the type we see in Brittan. The district attorney reasoned that the police officers' main goal was not to kill Mr. Thomas, ergo they did not commit murder.

However, law enforcment and criminal courts will tel you that killing someone during the commission of a felony, especially a felony in which there is a wanton and deliberate disregard for life that leads to foreseeable death, is murder. Does this law somehow not apply to police?

Police abuse has led to extreme violence in Greece, Egypt, Syria, and England it has led to the abyss of anarchy. In Tunisia, police abuse and government indifference led to Mohammed Bouazizi engaging in self-immolation that sparked a violent revolution and led to the overthrow of the government.

Domestically, the power of our media, hence the position of the corporate elite of whom have unwittingly shaped the opinions of the populace, seek to keep people subjugated so as to prevent the public from discovering this festering disease of police state abuse being hidden from the people. The media engages in propaganda for the government using all types of apologetics, disinformation and thought-control by attempting to create subterfuge through pretend issues, mitigating circumstances that are contrived and irrelevent facts merely meant to confuse.

In the Kelly Thomas media/propaganda operation the first line of duty death of a police officer that occurred after Kelly Thomas's murder was brandished about to attempt to show that cops sometimes have to make split-second decisions regarding life and death. In this particular case a criminal pulled next to a police car, leveled a shotgun and blasted a police officer. So, how is that relevent to six officers all holding one man down and beating him unconscious and then finally into brain death? There was no split-second decision. But the media will garner support for a group of officers in sharply pressed uniforms with neatly trimmed haircuts, shiny badges and highly polished shoes who answer questions in terms such as, "Yes, sir." and "No, ma'am.", to garner public support for murders.

I have had several encounters with police who out-stepped their authority and in each case I was falsely charged with crimes. It was not so much being charged with crimes that bothered me. What bothered me were the rampant lies, false reports and perjury that in every single instance accompanied the false charges. In every case the lies were so ridiculous as to be found patently absurd. In every single case the police had me painted as a raving psychotic lunatic hurling f-bombs and being irrational as soon as I was approached . In one case I was arrested in Indiana by the Valparaiso Police Department for taking a picture of a car wreck.

One officer said I refused to leave the scene. Another officer said I fled the scene and had to be chased. A police picture showed by 10 feet away from the crash scene with handcufss on me after I was supposedly chased across a field. Another officer said I was using profanity and resisting arrest, while three civilian witnesses testified that the police were lying about everything and every issue. All the civilians were astonished that police engaged in perjury so shamelessly, mercilessly, and maliciously. They were astonished that the prosecutors and judges allowed such obvious perjuries.

The officer threatened me and told me if I did not immediately surrender my smartphone and allow him to access all my data, he would charge me with numerous felonies and misdemeanors. I told him, "You can't do that." Then, he did. I thought the case would be immediately dismissed as I immediately turned around and put my hands behind my back. The Valparaiso Police Department confiscated my cell phone and accused me of the felony, Tampering With Evidence and charged me with “Resisting Arrest”, “Interfering with Law Enforcement” and “Disorderly Conduct”. They then used excessive force injuring me even though I had not resisted in the slightest. What I had underestimated was the extent to which these police officers would engage in conspiracy and perjury. They then sought and were issued a search warrant stating they needed all the data off my phone to include phone numbers, pictures, all typed data and digital information.

As I know judges love to carry water for abusive police serving the state, I demanded a jury trial. The trial was a two-day fiasco in which police contradicted themselves and looked like buffoons. The judge was forced to dismiss the “Resisting Law Enforcement” and “Interfering with Law Enforcement on its merits as nothing I did that the officers described met any elements of the crimes with which I had been charged.

The officers, five of them, then went all-out and each officer engaged in a criminal conspiracy and felonies by making false and conflicting police reports and issuing false and conflicting police testimony. As I had not met an elements of the crimes with which I had been charged, the more serous felonies and misdeamors were immediately summarily dismissed. So, they decided to go all out on lying about the "Disorderly Conduct" charge. Their lies were conflicting and absurd. The Valparaiso Police officer, Captain Michael DeHaven, laughed at me as the jury decided its verdict, but the jury came back with a "Not Guilty" on the last remaining charge of “Disorderly Conduct”.

When I attempted to get my arrest record expunged, as all the serious charges were wholly without merit, Valparaiso, Indiana's Porter County Judge, David Chidester, refused to remove the arrest because in his findings the jury had taken too long to render its Not Guilty verdict after having had to sift through two days of conflicting and perjurous testimony.

The Porter County Prosecutor’s office for the State of Indiana who knew the police were lying, had deposed all the witnesses prior to the case. The prosecutor was about to drop the case when they were told to pursue the false charges. The Porter County prosecutor was contacted prior to the writing of this article but refused to make a comment. They claimed, “The system worked as it’s supposed to.”

On another occasion I was investigating an attack by multiple assailants for a victim by attempting to get witnesses when the Schererville Police Department had six officers attack me, tear my recorder out of my hand, damage the recording device and delete the recording. They then surrounded me, grabbed me, refused to answer if I was under arrest, pushed me in a police car, and then drove me miles from where I was and forced me out of the police car.

I filed a civil complaint, but all the officers all lied in court documents and said I voluntarily accepted a ride. I told them ahead of time not to falsely accuse me of anything as I was recording the incident. So, they claimed they mistook my recording device for a weapon and were forced to disarm me. They then deleted the recording and damaged the device. They then claimed I voluntarily accepted a ride when six of them grabbed me and forced me into a police car.

If I had resisted, they would have said I had been placed under arrest even after they refused to answer this query I had issued over a dozen times. They all laughed at me and denied the charges, and they all got away with it.

In both instances police injured me, used excessive force and threatened me after the incident, but when I went to the police station the officers in charge refused to take a report.

It seems committing perjury appears to be a perk of being a law enforcement agent. Not only is perjury condoned by criminals in robes presiding over kangaroo courts, it is encouraged and protected by those in power.

I had originally thought this abuse was directed wholly against me and took it very personally. I now see it is a disease within law enforcement, the prosecutors and the courts. The "justice" Americans now languish under is on par with the with that received by French peasants prior to the French Revolution or Russian dissidents demanding humane treatment under the Soviet NKVD. The only thing that saves Americans is that they get some semblance of a jury trial where the judges still try to stack the deck in pre-trial hearings so as to deny, not foster, justice. But, this is only when one has the means to pay for a jury trial. Our system is all about money, state power and control in the form of oppression. It is true police “Serve and Protect”, but it is the state and its abusive power, tyranny and criminal rackets that are served and protected. The attitude of the Marie Antoinette lawyer class is, “Let them eat cake.” If Americans are lucky, we will have our “Age of Reason” and those acting as the new royalty and legal priesthood will soon be introduced to their Robspierre.

Not all officers make the decision to beat people to death, but most who don’t because of having no desire to savagely brutalize others due to conscience, societal constraints, or fear of getting caught, use ministrations of a corrupt justice system, tyranny of the state and the impunity provided by courts for committing perjury to falsely accuse thereby using a corrupt justice as their weapon of choice for the infliction of savagery via the state.

In the case of Kelly Thomas, the media, aside from blaming the brutal, savage and murderous beating on the fact that Mr. Thomas suffered from mental illness, then went on to say that people should not jump to conclusions, as murder is something that can only be defined by a court of law after a verdict. My response to that is to tell that to the families of the 68 victims of Anders Breivik murderous rampage.

Another telling sign about how corrupt our media is was that as the mainstream media, after working to misinform the public, failed to print Kelly Thomas’s face. Such an ommisson by the media was glaringly evident in its absence while it sought to convince Americans that such tyranny is something that should be supported by us mundanes because the police know best how to perform their jobs.

When a mainstream news article went on to excuse the crime by referencing the killing of an officer in the line of duty, as if because one officer being killed gives six police officers the license to smash a 140-pound man’s face into the concrete until unconscious and then finally brain dead, I was in disbelief. Just as I told Capt Michael DeHaven of the Valparaiso Police Department in Indiana after suffering their abuse, “You guys ought to be real proud of yourselves. You really stopped a big crime.”

The shooting of man in England led not to riots as the police and media want to portray, but to revolts and uprisings against those who deny justice and engage in tyranny. It led to anarchy because people are tired of a system that seeks a monopoly on violence so callously denies justice. This system's abuse by its agents' tyranny has gone unchecked, unpoliced, and is ofter rewarded, condoned, and in its most hideous forms excused or hidden. In most cases, where the proof is not so immediately obvious and where there are no witnesses, the state makes it very near impossible to gain redress.

Thomas Jefferson, our third president said, “The tree of liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” There is no doubt he was correct in his assessment, as the Constitution does not enforce itself, nor will tyrants acknowledge their criminal acts or the peoples’ right to seek revolution when the crimes under which they suffer become heinous. The state, never in the history of the world, lacked for minions to inflict its injustices and crimes while feeling self-aggrandized while being allowed to abuse and misuse office and power.

So, this is not the time to stand by and allow these criminals to get away with murder. It is not the time to allow the media to manufacture consent, apathy and confusion so as to cloud the issue. Now is the time to tell the government Americans will not stand for such tyranny, nor will we allow the government to abide by such misdeeds

The ironic part of this story is that as the beat this frail young man to death, he can be heard on video being tased five times and screaming for his life. As he yelled over and over again before being permanently silenced, "Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!", for his father, who was a retired police officer at a police training academy where he instructed officers how to effect an arrest without harming the suspect, Kelly Thomas’s father, Ron Thomas, was nowhere to be found. His fellow officers beat his son to death and now lie about the incident.

Ron Thomas called these officers a rouge group. Will Grigg begs to differ in his article “In Praise of Rogue Cops” , in which he proves this type of behavior is systematic. He runs a blog which documents crimes such as the murder of Marine Corps hero Derek Hale by police and their coverup. He has documented literally thousands of cases of police brutality like the BART shooting of an unarmed teenager who was shot in the back while laying face down and having two police officers on top of him. In the BART shooting, the first thing the officers did was to start threatening students and grabbing cell phones to hide the evidence of the killing. If they had succeeded in confiscating all the cell phones, this would have been followed up by the customary, “He pulled out a weapon.” The final result would be a review board finding him acting within the scope of proper police performance.

The Fullerton district attorney already concluded that the killing of Kelly Thomas was not murder because the officers did not act with the intention of killing him. I am sure he is right. What they did was kill him while in the process of committing a felony crime, which under United States law is murder. They killed that young man with wanton and reckless disregard for life because they knew if he had survived they would be exonerated. They reasoned it was safe to savagely beat this mentally ill man because it was so unlikely he would get justice. They all were very sure they would be protected and could get away with murder. This type of thinking comes from years of having gotten away with such abuse. They were quite sure Kelly Thomas did not have the ability to obtain justice against six liars willing to perjure themselves to hide such a hideous crime while prosecutors and judges stand so willing to cover murder committed by their fellow criminals who also wear state-issued costumes with guns and $2 badges. What these officers failed to recognize is that justice can take many forms. The justice Kelly Thomas would have received had he lived may end up being quite different than the justice he receives posthumously.

The judges, prosecutors and police in the U.S. no longer have any legitimacy except for that rendered upon mob bosses by mafia dons. Their monopoly on justice, as in all monopolies, has led to a shabby and expensive product being provided to the innocent.

Americans can smash this criminal racket. We can rise up and decide to quit playing their criminal games. We can decide we will be free of tyranny. If it takes a violent revolution and police assassinations to stop these atrocities, it will be the fault of corrupt police, prosecutors and judges, not the fault of the systems' victims who resisted tyranny.

The judges have provided a thin veneer of legitimacy to the crimes of police and prosecutors. They have been derelict in defending liberty and preventing government tyranny and criminality. But, it seems these arrogant malefactors relish in punishing those who stand up to tyranny and demand civil liberties. They have become arrogant tyrants thinking it is their court as opposed to the peoples' they have sworn to serve in the name of justice and under the Constitution.

Various groups are instituting a “Day of Rage in D.C.” It is Americans’ demand for a redress of grievances. Americans suffer under a warfare/welfare state. Prosecutors and judges have allowed a criminal system to steal all the wealth of the middle class. They have subjected Americans to a two-tiered justice system in which citizens are subjected to every specie of criminality, oppression and tyranny, while crimes against the people by those having or controlling government power have become institutionalized. They have made it almost impossible for peaceful change to occur. It was President Kennedy who said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

It seems the words of Justice Brandeis have come to be realized and America has become pregnant with issues of which have invited anarchy and threaten to bring the terrible retribution of which he warned.

Justice Brandeis said, “In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution.”

Just as the idiots in government were willfully ignorant of the financial disaster they have allowed to be inflicted upon our nation and indifferent to the crimes that caused it, so are they are willfully ignorant of the fire in the mind of men to have freedom and justice. But as Ayn Rand said, “You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”

One day people will wonder how it was that petty self-important government functionaries became so drunk on power and egotistical that they felt they could deny something so important, something so easily provided, something so ridiculously cheap and yet a fundamental and essential cornerstone upon which all society is built -that cornerstone being justice.

I ask all readers to join our “Dayof Rage in D.C.” on October 6th, 2011 in Washington D.C.'s Freedom Plaza. This movement has over a hundred progressive, libertarian, conservative and anti-war groups participating. This is your one chance to make a meaningful stand for justice.


by me
now we see why cops get killed .they desire it
by Bill Colohan
This is the best summary I have seen on the Kelly Thomas beating/death. The officers involved should be put away for life without parole. There is no excuse or explanation for this criminal behavior.
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!

Donate

$210.00 donated
in the past month

Get Involved

If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.

Publish

Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.

IMC Network