[Full text]
Portland police last November shot and killed a man who fled from a car that officers wrongly suspected had been involved in an armed robbery, newly released grand-jury testimony reveals.
Officer Christopher Sathoff, armed with an AR-15 rifle, chased after Immanueal Jaquez Clark-Johnson as he ran from a sedan that police surrounded in a church lot on Southeast Steele Street on Nov. 19, 2022.
Sathoff testified before a grand jury that he believed Clark-Johnson, 30, who was wearing a black-hooded jacket and blue jeans, was digging in his pocket with his right hand to reach for a gun, and so Sathoff fired three rounds at him, striking Clark-Johnson in the lower back. Sathoff said he heard Sgt. Adam Speer yell, “Stop or you will be shot,” as he chased after Clark-Johnson in the parking lot.
“He’s still got his hands in his pockets, and I don’t know why. I believed that he was going for a gun at this time, because I know that, from my training and my experience, that’s typically where subjects or suspects keep guns,” Sathoff told the grand jury.
Sathoff said he aimed at Clark-Johnson’s lower back and legs as Clark-Johnson was “facing away” from him, according to the transcripts.
Clark-Johnson was not armed, according to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office.
Clark-Johnson was taken to OHSU Hospital and died from his injuries two days later, according to the transcripts and the district attorney’s office.
The district attorney’s office on Friday released the grand-jury transcripts in the fatal police shooting, providing the first details of what led up to the shooting since Clark-Johnson’s death 10 months ago.
The initial call to police alerted them to an armed robbery in the parking lot of the Super Deluxe fast-food restaurant on Southeast Powell Boulevard and 50th Avenue at 12:27 a.m. on Nov. 19, 2022.
Officer James Brewer, the first to arrive on scene, put out a general description of a four-door sedan, dark or gray in color and with three or four people inside, as the suspect vehicle that left the scene. He said it was last seen heading west on Powell Boulevard.
A patrol supervisor, acting Sgt. Mike Francis, spotted a car turn east onto Powell Boulevard from about 23rd Avenue “at a real high rate of speed,” weaving in and out of traffic, and got behind it, according to his testimony. The car was a four-door silver sedan.
During a grand-jury hearing, Francis was asked if it was “reasonable, in your mind, that that was the vehicle that was involved in the robbery?”
“It certainly seemed like a very high possibility, yes,” he testified, noting that he saw three or four occupants in the car.
Patrol officers, with help from an overhead police plane, followed that car to the back parking lot of the Reedwood Friends Church at 2901 Southeast Steele Street.
Police at the scene believed the car stopped in the church’s parking lot had been involved in the armed robbery, but it was not the suspect vehicle.
As officers approached the car, three of the four occupants got out, and two ran north.
Sathoff shot Clark-Johnson as he was running north from the stopped vehicle, according to the transcripts.
Sathoff, who had been with the Police Bureau four years when the shooting occurred, remained off duty on paid leave after the shooting until last month when a grand jury found no criminal wrongdoing by police.
Sathoff is now assigned to the bureau’s Training Division to catch up on training he missed during the past 10 months, according to Sgt. Kevin Allen, a bureau spokesperson.
Clark-Johnson’s uncle Stanley Clark said he hasn’t received any information from police on why his nephew was killed.
“It’s been hush-hush,” he said. “I never heard anything from police.”
He said his nephew had been living on the streets and couch surfing at friends’ homes. Yet he had a good relationship with Clark-Johnson, noting how his nephew would often stop by his home in Southeast Portland to take a shower and always came by for the family’s Thanksgiving celebration.
They become cops because they want to kill people.