Diamond Reynolds: Castile's gun was 'absolutely not visible' before shooting
Philando Castile’s gun was “absolutely not visible,” when he was fatally shot by a police officer in suburban Minnesota last week, Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds told Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric on Monday.
Reynolds and her 4-year-old daughter, Dae-Anna, were in the car with Castile when St. Anthony Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez opened fire on him during a traffic stop. A graphic video that Reynolds livestreamed to Facebook in the immediate aftermath of the shooting has been viewed by millions.
In the interview with Couric, Reynolds and lawyer Larry Rogers countered the claim made by Yanez’s attorney over the weekend that the officer’s decision to use deadly force against Castile had “nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the presence of a gun.”
While she maintains that Castile informed Yanez of the fact that he was armed and licensed to carry a concealed weapon, Reynold’s said that the gun her boyfriend carried with him “everywhere” was “not visible to anyone” at the time of the shooting.
“It was concealed and the officer took matters into his own hands,” Reynolds said.
It’s exactly this kind of dispute over the details of what happened that Reynolds said motivated her to use the last 10 percent of battery life left on her phone and start livestreaming from the passenger seat, despite being terrified that Yanez might shoot her next.
“I knew with this police officer it was going to be his word against my word,” she said. “Had I not started livestreaming that video, who is to say I wouldn’t have been executed the way my boyfriend was?”
Rogers further suggested that if Reynolds had chosen to simply record a video of the incident rather than stream it directly to Facebook, Castile’s death might never have even made the news, as Reynolds’ phone was eventually confiscated by the police.
“It’s a sad state of affairs when people who have been victimized by the police have been ignored and it has taken the advent of the cell phone and instantaneous recording for people to believe what they’ve been claiming,” Rogers said. “That’s what lead Diamond to take out her phone, the feeling that she would not be believed.”