New footage has been released that shows Philando Castile’s fiancé, Diamond Reynolds, handcuffed in the back of a police car, her daughter crying and comforting her. This comes a week after Officer Jeranimo Yanez was acquitted on manslaughter charges for shooting Castile during a routine traffic stop, and less than a day after dashcam footage released by state investigators showed how quickly Yanez moved to shoot Castile.
In the footage released yesterday, Castile and Reynolds, who was sitting in the passenger seat, assured the officer he was reaching for his ID and not his firearm, when Yanez began yelling, “Don’t pull it out!” Not long after, Yanez proceeded fire seven shots at Castile in front of his fiancé and her daughter, who was in the backseat. Reynolds also livestreamed the aftermath of the shooting, showing Castile in the driver’s seat covered in blood.
In the newly released video, Reynolds sits in the back of a police car in handcuffs with her daughter. Reynolds struggles with her handcuffs, but her daughter pleads throughout the video that Reynolds should remain calm because she doesn’t want her “to get shooted.” They continue to talk to each other, and at one point Reynolds’ daughter says to her “I can keep you safe,” while crying.
In the background, you can hear police radios, and at the end of the video, Reynolds appears to be talking to an officer telling them that her phone just died and she has no way of contacting family before the video cuts off.
The release of this new footage and the dashcam video continue to cause outrage of the recent verdict.
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Further infuriating activists is that court documents revealed today that the smell of weed was what drove Yanez to fear his life and shoot at Castile, Complex reports.
“I thought, I was gonna die,” Yanez said in the documents, “and I thought if he’s, if he has the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me?”
Yanez also implied that Castile’s gun could have been used to fend off drug dealers.
“Being that the inside of the vehicle smelled like marijuana, I didn’t know if he was keeping it on him for protection from a drug dealer or anything like that, or any other people trying to rip him,” Yanez testified. “Rip him meaning steal from him.”
Following the verdict, Yanez was let go from the St. Anthony Police Department.
