No charges for Erick Gelhaus

[TAZ]

Quote from the shooter about kids with BB guns that was posted on the forum Firing Line..... sounds like he had a plan all laid out before hand.

"It’s going to come down to YOUR ability to articulate to law enforcement and very likely the Court that you were in fear of death or serious bodily injury. I think we keep coming back to this, articulation — your ability to explain why — will be quite significant."

Does anyone have a source of where there is anything about the 13 year old pointing the AK as if to shoot anyone ? I have been unable to find anything that says this was the case. The statements I have found only say the 13 year old started to turn around after being yelled at by le and "it looked like" the muzzle was rising. If the 13 year old was gunned down from the back it was not self defense.

So basically, you are contending that a person who paraphrases the teachings of almost all self defense and LEO trainers is making a plan to murder someone. The concept that you will need to clearly articulate the reasons for being in fear for ice or serious injury is one that is taught at every CHL class, and every defensive handgun class/lecture I have ever attended. So are we all now murderers in training??

I'd like to see your data for the claims that the kid was shot in the back or after he was downs and no longer a threat. All I've seen are the reports linked here and other forums that pretty much show a tragic, but justifiable shooting.

I've no dog in this hunt as I don't know the guy nor have any history with him, so show me the evidence and I'll listen.

[pax]

You can find the complete DA's report here (pdf link).

Given the facts as presented, Erick Gelhaus had absolutely no choice. He did the only reasonable thing he could do under the circumstances.

pax

[Shellback]

From http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article...0709728#page=0

Great find. Really spells out a lot of what may have gone wrong that day.

Lopez also had a joint and a bottle of Visine on his body at the time he was killed, according to the report. The THC levels in Lopez's system likely affected his behavior that day, Jones said.

“Cognitive and behavioral effects that typically follow marijuana use would likely have been present to a significant degree during the interval following,” Jones wrote, according to the report.

A 13-year-old boy high on marijuana would likely have had suffered “impaired judgment, slowed decision making and increased mental processing time,” the report found, “particularly when having to deal with performance of a sudden, unanticipated tasks, including decisions that needed to be quickly responded to.”

The new information provides potentially important context for the day of the shooting and may help explain why Lopez did not initially drop the gun when ordered and instead turned toward officers.

California Senate Bill 199, co-authored by state Sen. Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, would expand the federal law that requires imitation firearms be sold with an orange tip, a feature that had been removed from the gun Lopez was carrying when he was shot.

[JDM]

You can find the complete DA's report here (pdf link).

Given the facts as presented, Erick Gelhaus had absolutely no choice. He did the only reasonable thing he could do under the circumstances.

pax

Thank you for the link, Pax.

[Tamara]

Where does he say that?

I had you figured as being better at internet arguing than that.

It's emanated in his penumbras.

Why even engage when absolutely nothing you can say will affect the other's opinion one iota?

I haven't done any serious internet arguing in many years. All I do now are shallow, snide remarks. It's better for my blood pressure.

[Chuck Haggard]

A metric kitten ton of people are making a huge deal of the fact that this "child" was 13 years old, as though this made him automatically undangerous.

I will refute that sort of thinking by pointing out that Jonesboro Ark. was a complex long range ambush planned and executed by a 13 and 11 year old;
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...sas-kills-five

And, well, then there is this sort of thing;
https://www.google.com/search?q=chil...iers+&tbm=isch

[Totem Polar]

So very, very OT, but, Tom's pressdemocrat article yields one of the best sentences regarding "activist" behavior that I've ever seen in print: "[lawyer, activist]... Melrod screamed into a scrum of television cameras."

[pax]

A metric kitten ton of people are making a huge deal of the fact that this "child" was 13 years old, as though this made him automatically undangerous.

Human nature. We want self-defense shootings to be about justice. About fairness. We want the story to be about the forces of good overcoming an evil criminal hardened bad guy scumbag vicious nasty dude who "got what he deserved," who "had it coming to him," who "needed killing." It goes against the grain to look at a kid dying in a situation like this, because at 13 years old, no matter what the backstory might have been about what he was planning to do, a kid just does not fit into that story. There's nothing that feels fair or just or right about the violent death of a youngster that age. But self-defense isn't about fairness or justice. It's just about survival. That's all it is.

Everything about this case sucks great big kitten balls, including the political / social / economic / personal implications of the aftermath. I'm glad Erick Gelhaus was no billed, and hope the other shoes finish falling quickly -- and in the right direction. He did nothing to deserve this, or the public outcry over it.

pax

[Wayne Dobbs]

Corvus,

You clearly don't know what you don't know. I think that you should consider trying to get into an objective frame of mind, read the investigative report THOROUGHLY and then read it again, THOROUGHLY. Then think on the job of LE for a while and all the variations, complications and challenges it presents on a daily basis. After you've done so, then have your say. You've not been in Erick Gelhaus' shoes, or mine, or Nyeti's or any of the other LEOs on this forum that have been put in split second deadly force decision making messes. Until you have a valid frame of reference, your pronouncements only show you to be the ignoramus you clearly are.

[jlw]

I may have recounted this tale on the forum previously, but here goes:

One night just as we went on shift we had a shooting in which a person walking down a sidewalk was shot in the back of the leg. Nobody saw the shooter, but several witnesses described a very distinctive vehicle as having driven by at the exact time of the shooting.

Later in the shift, I responded to a call of a fight in progress. As I arrived on scene, I see a vehicle matching the description from the earlier shooting leaving with a group of guys chasing it on foot. It was indeed the vehicle that had been seen earlier in the night. I caught up to it and hit the lights. The stop was smack in the middle of the downtown party area of a major college town. It was occupied by two young adult males who both exited the car. As the passenger did so, light from a streetlight glinted off of silver object in his hand. He can tell you exactly how many lands and grooves are in the barrel of a S&W 4006.

The only reason he was not shot was his immediate compliance with my commands.

As it all turns out, it was two brothers that had decided to go downtown to get something to eat. They just happened to drive by a guy who got shot walking down a sidewalk (actual shooter was caught later in the night after he took shots at an officer). They then parked in a frat house parking lot and walked downtown. When they came back to their car, the frat boys jumped them, one of them unleashed a can of pepper spray, and then the brothers jumped in the car and took off with the frat boys chasing them down the street.

The item in the passenger's hand was a silver flip phone.

I came within milliseconds of shooting a guy armed only with a cell phone.

It was all a perfect storm of events, and if I had dropped the hammer, I would have been perfectly justified in doing so based on the totality of the circumstances.

The headlines would have been "Cop Shoots Guy Holding Cell Phone", and I'm sure it would have been fodder on gun forums.

I'm forever grateful that I made a correct decision in not shooting. I'm even more grateful that my decision not to shoot didn't result in my own self being shot that night.

We have years to pick apart decisions that were made in a split second. Sometimes those decisions have tragic consequences.