In another tragic turn of events involving the Oklahoma police departments, a 35-year-old deaf man by the name of Magdiel Sanchez was brutally murdered by Sgt. Christopher Barnes and Lt. Matthew Lindsey, when they cowardly discharged their weapons at 15-feet distance against the unarmed innocent man with no criminal history whatsoever, whilst ignoring the sobbing pleas of Mr. Sanchez’s neighbors, who were telling the officers that the man was deaf.
“He’s deaf! He’s deaf!.” screamed desperately neighbor Julio Rayos at the murderous cops who decided to ignore his scream. Mr. Rayos claims that one of the officers turned back at him before shooting and listened to what he was telling him, still, the cop decided to ignore this and proceeded to unload his gun against Sanchez.
The officers arrived at the scene with their weapons already drawn, looking for the driver of a hit and run incident from an area nearby, when they arrived, Sanchez was on his porch holding a two-foot-long metal pipe covered in material and a leather loop.
The cops were actually looking for Magdiel’s father, who was the person involved in the hit and run incident, instead, they came across Magdiel who approached the cops unaware of their screams ordering him to drop the pipe. Sanchez who was non-verbal and had developmental disabilities must have been very confused in the last moments of his life, not understanding why two cops were pointing guns at him.
Sanchez who communicated with his hands struck the back of his truck with the pipe, in what his neighbor Julio Rayos believed to be a way of him trying to communicate.
USA TODAY
“The guy does movements. He don’t speak, he don’t hear, so mainly it’s hand movements that he does. That’s how we communicated with him,” Rayos claims. “I believe he was frustrated, trying to tell them what was going on.”
Sgt. Barnes who fired the gun, was placed on administrative leave while the investigation goes underway, Lt. Lindsey unloaded his taser at Sanchez while Barnes shot him. None of the officers was wearing a body camera.
“In those situations, very volatile situations, you have a weapon out, you can get what they call tunnel vision, or you can really lock into just the person that has the weapon that’d be the threat against you,” Oklahoma City Police Capt. Bo Mathews tried to justify to the media. “I don’t know exactly what the officers were thinking at that point.”
Sanchez has become another of the 712 people that have been killed by the police in the course of 2017, according to the Washington Post’s Fatal Force database.