The wife of an armed New Mexico homeowner whom police officers fatally shot when they went to the wrong house on a domestic violence call said she was treated like a suspect, detained for hours and given few details about why officers gunned down her husband.
Months later, the Farmington Police Department still hasn’t reached out to Kim Dotson or her family since police killed Robert Dotson, 52, on April 5, she said.
She said in an interview Wednesday that she learned the officers had knocked on the wrong door that night only because her son is a police officer in the area and was able to read the dispatch log.
“I feel helpless the way all of this has happened,” said Dotson, 49, a former trauma nurse, who said she quit the profession after she tended to her husband when he was shot multiple times in the doorway of their home.
“I don’t understand how these guys get to go home to their families and they broke apart our family,” she said.
“We didn’t do anything wrong.”
Unaware that it was police officers who had opened fire, Dotson said, she returned fire — and the officers shot 19 more times into her home, according to a civil rights suit her family filed in federal district court Friday.
She was uninjured and hasn’t faced charges. …
I make a minor faux pas and ruminate on it for a decade. How does one live after taking a life entirely in error? How do we allow this to happen more than once?
Oh, thanks for this. It’s something I’ve wondered too, though I hadn’t put it into words.
When I fuck something up, I feel awful about it. I apologize. I try to make it right — and none of my stupidities have killed anyone.
How can cops care so little?
Lack of empathy.
They justify it because he was armed.
Yet we have the 2nd amendment here. It was his home.
Cops are quick to shoot. That’s a problem.
ETA: the standard is police can use deadly force to stop a threat. That means they’re in danger or someone else is. Yet they seem to see gun and shoot. We are an armed society and just seeing a gun shouldn’t cause anyone to panic.
We need a more narrow defined threat.
Im more conservative and philando Castille shows how fucked up our system is. The cop should have never shot. Both sides should have rioted over that case. That to me showed how badly we need reform