Judge releases body cam video of deadly shooting after officer is acquitted

Warning: this video contains graphic content. The actual shooting takes place at approximately 4:25 in the below clip.

One day after former officer Philip Brailsford was acquitted of second-degree murder charges in the shooting death of Daniel Shaver, a judge released the full video of the incident.

Mesa Police Department officers responded to a call about a man allegedly pointing a rifle out a fifth-floor window of a La Quinta Inn back in January 2016.

The incident

Shaver was in the room with a woman, and they were taking shots of rum as he showed her a pellet gun he used for his work in pest control.

When police arrived, Shaver and the woman exited the room and complied with officers’ commands to get on the ground and put their hands up.

The officers had the woman crawl down the hallway, and took her into custody. That left Shaver in the hallway, laying on the ground.

Sgt. Charles Langley ordered him put his hands on his head and cross his feet. Then the officer told him to push himself up in a kneeling position.

Shaver struggled with the command. His legs came uncrossed, and he placed his hands near his waist, prompting a warning from Langley.

“You do that again, we’re shooting you, do you understand?” Langley told Shaver.

The officers had Shaver begin crawling down the hallway, but while he was crawling he reached back for an unknown reason, and Brailsford shot him five times, believing Shaver was reaching for a gun.

Shaver was unarmed at the time, and two pest control pellet guns were found in the hotel room.

Brailsford acquitted

Brailsford was found not guilty of murder and a lesser charge of manslaughter, and said he had no regrets about how he handled the situation, believing he made the right decision in the split second scenario.

“If this situation happened exactly as it did that time, I would have done the same thing,” Brailsford said during the trial. “I believed 100 percent he was reaching for a gun.”

(H/T Washington Post)