Almost seven years after the shooting of Oscar Grant on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in Oakland, one of the first viral police abuse videos of the Youtube era, another video has surfaced showing BART police officers surrounding a man on a train platform, who appears to have just been shot.
At first, it appears as if the cops had just shot the man but there is also the possibility that he shot himself.
A voice can be heard saying, “holy shit, do we need to get him somewhere?”, but it’s not clear if that is a cop speaking or a witness.
The video, which was recorded by a witness from across the set of tracks on a different platform, ends after 1:25 minutes, so there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered, which we are working on.
Akshay Dodeja, who recorded the video, posting it on Twitter and Facebook, stated the following on the latter:
Just witnessed a shooting at West Oakland Bart station. Heard a bang. Then saw 2 cops and a black man on the ground. He was also tazed. The guy was yelling “they shot me.. they shot me”.
Bizarrely the cop yelled back “he shot himself”
They instantly announced that the station has been shut down.
According to another witness he was trying to commit suicide.
So it could very well be that he shot himself, but the video still brings flashbacks to the Oscar Grant shooting in the Fruitvale Station, only two stops from the West Oakland Station, which is where this incident took place.
Grant was shot in the back by a BART police officer named Johannes Mehserle on January 1, 2009. Videos of the incident, as some of you old-time PINAC readers should remember, went hugely viral, resulting in a manslaughter conviction against the cop, who served almost a year in jail.
A video of the Oscar Grant shooting is below after this most recent video.
