Officer went into 'dad mode' when he confronted boys with realistic-looking toy gun: 'Do you think I want to shoot an 11-year-old?'
A Columbus, Ohio, police officer trained in de-escalation responded to a call about two young black males flashing a gun, according to body-camera video footage released Monday. Officer Peter Casuccio was able to handle the situation safely and realized that the young boys were playing with a BB gun when the 11-year-old pulled the apparent firearm from his waist and tossed it onto the sidewalk, breaking the air gun.
He chose to make it a learning moment for the boys.
Casuccio, a father of a 2-year-old with another child on the way, told KTLA that he went into “dad mode.”
“So we’re driving down the road, right, and they call in and they say there’s two young male blacks, one with all-red pants and a blue sweatshirt and one wearing red and black. They look really young, and they just flashed a gun,” Casuccio can be heard telling the boys in the bodycam footage, according to Fox News.
Casuccio told the boys that their BB gun “looks real,” and they can be heard apologizing. “You should be sorry, and you should be scared,” the officer said. “Do you think I want to shoot an 11-year-old? Do you think I want to shoot a 13-year-old?”
“This is getting kids killed all over the country,” Casuccio told the children, referring to their BB gun. Columbus, where the incident took place, is just 100 miles south from Cleveland, where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed, in 2014 by officer Timothy Loehmann when he responded to a similar 911 report stating that someone had a gun in a park. Rice was playing with a toy pellet gun.
The 13-year-old’s mother arrived at the scene and took him home. Officer Casuccio drove the 11-year-old back home to his mother. “You’ve got to go answer for your sins to momma,” he said. At the boy’s house, he told the mother what happened. She wasn’t even aware he had a BB gun.
“He could’ve shot you for that, you know that?” the boy’s mother said.
“I could have killed you,” the officer said. “I want you to think about that tonight when you go to bed. Everything you want to do in this life could’ve been over.”
Casuccio said that he is “not this gem” and “not an anomaly.” He believes that an “overwhelming majority of police officers feel the same way. They do the same thing.”
The two boys were not charged.
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