A distraught mother in Utah called police for help with her 13-year-old autistic son who has having a mental episode, refusing to allow her to take him to the hospital for treatment.
Salt Lake City police showed up and shot him several times.
Linden Cameron was unarmed.
“I don’t feel to good,” said Cameron after a cop fired his gun almost a dozen times. “Tell my mom I love her.”
The incident took place on September 4 after Cameron’s mother, Golden Barton, called 911 because her son was “out of control.” She said she needed to take him to a local hospital for treatment but he was refusing to go.
She told the dispatcher that he son had been in a “shootout” with cops before in another state and might even be in possession of a fake gun. She also told the dispatcher that her son is “triggered” by cops which probably made the cops even more paranoid than usual.
According to the Salt Lake City Tribune:
Barton told the dispatcher that Linden has led police on a chase before and had been in “a shootout” with a police agency in Nevada. She said that her son had showed an employee of hers a fake gun the previous day, and told the officers who arrived that he might have that gun with him.
She warned the dispatcher, and later told responding officers, that Linden was scared of police and that a police badge was a “trigger.”
“We need him to go to the hospital,” the mother told an officer, according to bodycam video. “I need him to go to a hospital. I can’t get him to get there on my own. And I cannot do this every night.”
A team of officers went to the home to try to get Linden, the body camera footage shows, but he ran from the house into the backyard, and then ran into the neighborhood.
The officers went after him, with two of the officers breaking through a wooden fence to try to get to the running boy. The chase was short, and the body camera shows only one officer fired his weapon.
Police have said after the shooting that they found “no indication” the boy had a weapon on him.
Cameron survived the shooting but is still hospitalized and will probably never walk normal again, his brother told the Salt Lake City Tribune.
Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill is still reviewing the case to see if any charges will be filed against the cop.
It is still not clear what incident Golden was referring to when she told dispatchers her son had been involved in a shootout with cops in Nevada but the Reno Gazette Journal reported earlier this year that her father, Owen E. Barton, had been killed by the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office in Nevada.
Camerons family have set up a Go Fund Me drive to raise money for his medical expenses. They have raised $98,906 out of a goal of $100,000 as of this writing.
