Attorney: Castile looked like armed robbery suspect
An attorney for Jeronimo Yanez, the police officer who shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop in suburban Minnesota last week in which the video of the aftermath went viral, says his client pulled the 32-year-old Castile over because he looked like the suspect of a recent armed robbery.
“All he had to have was reasonable suspicion to pull him over,” attorney Thomas Kelly told the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Sunday.
Over the weekend, local NBC affiliate KARE 11 published an audio recording of what may have been the police scanner conversation that preceded the traffic stop resulting in Castile’s death.
In the clip, which was provided to KARE 11 by a viewer, an officer can be heard saying, “I’m going to stop a car … I’m going to check IDs. I have reason to pull it over.”
The officer then says that “the two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery,” adding that “the driver looks more like one of our suspects, just ‘cause of the wide-set nose.”
KARE 11 noted that St. Anthony police officials did not respond to attempts to confirm the recording’s authenticity. But, the local news outlet reported that it was able to match the license plate number provided in the scanner clip with the plate on Castile’s car, and that the location given by the officer in the recording is in line with where the traffic stop took place.
According to the Star Tribune, one day before Yanez pulled over Castile, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension had called on the public to help identify two men suspected in the July 2 robbery of a convenience store in the small city of Lauderdale, which the St. Anthony Police Department also patrols.
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Like Castile, both of the robbery suspects were described as African American men with dreadlocks. But while Kelly argued that Castile’s perceived similarity to one of the suspects gave Yanez probable cause to pull him over, he insisted that the fatal shooting — which, along with the police-involved death of another African American man in Baton Rouge days earlier, has prompted days of nationwide protests — “had nothing to do with race.”
Rather, Kelly said, it had to do with the fact that Castile was armed.
“Deadly force would not have been used if not for the presence of a gun,” he said.
It has since been confirmed that Castile was licensed to carry a gun in the state of Minnesota.
In a graphic video of the shooting’s aftermath, which Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, streamed from the passenger seat via Facebook live, Reynolds said that Castile tried to tell Yanez and his partner, officer Joseph Kauser, that he had a permit to carry before the officer shot him. Kelly declined to confirm this in his interview with the Star Tribune.
The Star Tribune was unable to confirm whether Castile was, in fact, considered a suspect in the July 2 robbery. But even if he was, attorney Albert Goins, who worked with Castile’s family in the aftermath of the shooting, argued that Yanez’s actions would’ve violated protocol.
“A felony stop does not usually involve officers walking up to your car and asking you to produce your driver’s license,” the attorney said. “A felony stop involves bringing the suspect out at gunpoint while officers are in a position of cover and having them lie on the ground until they can identify who that individual is.”
So, Goins said, “either [Castile] was a robbery suspect and [Yanez] didn’t follow the procedures for a felony stop, or [Castile] was not a robbery suspect and [Yanez] shot a man because he stood at his window getting his information.”
Both Yanez and Kauser are currently on paid administrative leave.
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