“I’ll take rhetorical questions for 100, Alex.”
“When I saw that video, my thought process switched…I knew which direction I had to go. I was shocked,” Pace testified. After viewing it a second time, he said he was “charged up, because I was offended by what I had seen.”
Yeah, what a horrible cop he is. He took the homeowners report, collected evidence, and observed that the homeowner was a lying piece of shit and had obviously committed a crime. Let’s hang that cop!
Pace said he found the video “offending.”
Zeigler told investigators he was awakened by his wife screaming that someone was trying to break into the house. Pace said Zeigler told him he saw a person trying to charge through the front door and felt threatened. He said he ran down the stairs thinking, “Hell no, not again.”
“He (Zeigler) said the suspect said some (expletive) as he was walking away from the house but after he fired the shot, ran off,” Pace said.
Pace told jurors what they would eventually see on the video: that the teenager appeared to be calmly approaching the house and then running away. The detective said Zeigler never slipped, stumbled or fell and appeared to be readying his shoulder for the subsequent recoil blast from the Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun.
Police have to investigate when a crime is reported. And Pace did his job right. Show me evidence that he didn’t. Explain to me why he should automatically assume the person reporting a crime was lying.
And you think he would have responded differently after the video outed him and proved that his “thought process” was skewed toward wrongly believing the white guy?
We recently got rid, finally from our HOA, a dbag racist like this, his weapon of choice was a Co2 pellet gun, twice he went to the grey bar hotel for it, but it took beating his poor wife to get State Pen time. Adios scumbag!
Deputy Travis Dick testified he responded to the “attempted home invasion” and found the teenager, who matched the description of the suspect, walking in the subdivision.
“He appeared shook up and had a tear running down his cheek,” Dick said.
A neighbor, James McFee, said the teenager had knocked on his door a few minutes earlier, and he talked with him on the front porch and provided him with directions, which “required a series of turns to get out of the subdivision.” He described the teenager as “a bit nervous but polite.”
The sheriff’s Rochester Hills substation reported no problems with either the student or Zeigler in the past but did say records showed multiple runs had been made to the Zeigler home for break-ins and the theft of beer from a garage in 2009. A teenager was eventually prosecuted for those break-ins.
I don’t see anything indicating the police did anything wrong within any article I’ve read so far. Prove me wrong. The police received a report of an attempted home invasion. They responded, they investigated, they found no evidence of an attempted home invasion and instead saw that homeowner attempted to kill an innocent kid and arrested the homeowner. Is there any indication that the police arrested or harassed the kid in any way? Sure they questioned him, but did they overreact? Doesn’t sound like it.
I just don’t get it. Are you all saying that if a white person reports a crime it should automatically be ignored until further evidence is provided?
Well, if we’re talking about Yosemite Sam, the homeowner who unlawfully discharged a firearm? And before you type another word: the he claimed it went off “accidentally.”
That’s a lie. It’s always a lie. It’s a lie if you know anything about firearms. It’s a lie if you don’t because there are no accidents with guns.
Cops ought to know that.
'He [Ziegler] is no stranger to gun charges. In 2004, police in Warren, Michigan arrested Zeigler on accusations that he shot “at a car in a road rage incident on I-696,” [Fox 2 Detroit reported.]
Ya just gotta believe what comes out of his mouth.
Perhaps someone here that thinks this cop is the reason black men kneel could tell us how he could have acted differently to avoid that distinction?
The cop watched the video and saw the guy was lying! He saw the lie for what it was. WTF? All of you fail at reading horribly.
It is clear as day what happened if you read these articles. The police received a report of an attempted home invasion. They investigated, as they are obligated to do. The homeowner lied to the police. That’s not the fault of the police! The police continued their investigation, they watched the video the homeowner provided. The video showed that the homeowner lied. This was the first piece of evidence the police were provided. The police arrested the homeowner, as they should have. The homeowner is now being tried for his crimes. How is this wrong? The kid was not arrested, he was not charged, he was not tried. The kid is innocent, the police know this, saw it as soon as they saw the video, and have treated him as such.
Do you expect the police to be telepathic? Do you expect the police to believe that every person who reports a crime is lying? Just what more could the police do in this case?
None of the responses I have received here is rational. Not one person has shown any indication that the police were racist other than the fact than they responded to a report of a crime by a white person. And what did the police do when they investigated that crime? The arrested the white person! What more could they possibly do? Are you suggesting that they should have arrested the homeowner the moment he made this false report without any investigation or looking into any evidence of the supposed crime?
The police did everything correct in this case. Justice is actually being served for once. It’s an amazing day. We should be praising the police for acting responsibly in this case and investigating the crime and arresting the actual criminal, not the innocent victim.
You know, I’m not ever going to tire of pointing this out. And I am not ever going to stop, until it’s universally accepted:
There are no accidents with guns.
Anyone who says theirs went off accidentally in the direction of another human being has just lied about it.
Now why would they be lying?
Honestly, I came here ready nd willing to crucify the cop but, it does appear that he did his job properly. What I will criticize is the fact that doing his job is somehow really surprising. In this case, he evaluated the evidence and came to the correct conclusion. Odds on the kid rotting in jail had there been no video? Not a huge fan of the universal surveillance culture we have developed, but maybe not entirely evil.
You’re right, there are no accidental discharges. And guess what, this person lied to the police, the police investigated, figured out he was lying, and arrested him. Is that wrong? Should they have not done that?
When the person reporting the crime is already known to the police for firearms-related crimes, yes.
Tell the responding officer about the criminal history of the person reporting the crime. Which I guarantee they would have done if Ziegler had been anything other than white, because of something called institutional racism.
So, how should the cop have responded to not be labeled the reason black men kneel?
Is there backstory I am unfamiliar with? I have not seen @KeithLM make any heinous statements. Not sure I get the response to his statements.
I wouldn’t buy the “tripped and the gun went off by itself” excuse even if it was a sentient death-stick howling “Blood and Souls for my Lord Arioch!”
Agree. First lesson at the range was there are no accidents. You are 100% responsible for anything and everything, intended or not, that occurs with your firearm.
The police investigated, they correctly identified the criminal, arrested, and charged him. The police doing the initial investigation probably didn’t have all the homeowner’s history at that time. And keep in mind someone had previously stolen from his house before and had been arrested for it. So there is history of crime in the area. A report of a home invasion is serious, and needs to be, and was, carefully investigated.
People who have a criminal history should still be protected from crime, should they not? They should be able to report a crime also and have it investigated.
I just don’t get it. The police did their jobs right for once, and yet here on boingboing they are still attacked for it. Unbelievable.
