‘Please, I don’t want to die.’ Elk Grove police body-cam video captures fatal shooting
Newly released bodycam footage shows that Booker T. Pannell III put his hands up and said, “Please, please, I don’t want to die” before Elk Grove police officers chased him down a hotel hallway and shot him Feb. 21.
Pannell was pronounced dead at a hospital later that night. He was 40. In a brief phone conversation, his father — who shares his son’s name — said, “He was a good person. He was a good man. That’s all I can say right now.”
The Elk Grove Police Department on Friday night released footage from body-worn cameras and a hotel security camera. An investigation into the officers’ use of force is ongoing.
Pannell died during a continued local and national reckoning with policing practices fueled by fatal encounters with law enforcement. In January, the death in Memphis, Tennessee, of Tyre Nichols, a Black man who grew up in Sacramento, renewed scrutiny of police violence; five officers face second-degree murder charges for Nichols’ beating death.
Mapping Police Violence and local news coverage show that police killed six people in use of force incidents in Sacramento County last year.
Internal and outside investigators have not determined whether officers followed proper protocols the night Pannell died.
What led up to Booker Pannell’s death?
According to the video, someone called police Feb. 21 to report a carjacking near Shana Way and Whitelock Parkway. Dispatch received the report at 10:32.
In the 911 excerpt in the video, the caller asks police to come to her house. “My husband had an altercation with his friend, and the friend took our car,” the caller says. “And he pulled a gun out on my husband.”
An officer went to the house to take a statement from the husband. In the footage, the husband calmly emerges and speaks to the officer. He explains, “My friend and his girlfriend came by, and I was asleep. And long story short, he was having some type of side effects or whatever — I think he was on meth. So he was out here with his girlfriend ... he’s been paranoid, saying the cops is looking into drones, stuff like that. So I said, look, let me take you to the hospital.”
He said he was starting to drive to the hospital with his friend, Pannell, and turned on his blinker to make a left turn on Whitelock when the friend said, “You in on it, too.” He said his friend started screaming, and said, “They’re coming to get me.” He said Pannell pulled out his gun, pointed it at him, and then pointed it at his own head.
The husband fled the car. He told the officer, “I thought he was gonna kill me.”
Around 11:40 p.m., the video says, officers went to the Holiday Inn Express on Stockton Boulevard and Laguna Boulevard, right off Highway 99. A hotel employee had reported a disturbance. A very short clip of security footage from the Holiday Inn shows a man in the lobby leaning over the front desk; that footage has no audio.
When police arrived, they saw the car that had been reported stolen sitting empty in the Holiday Inn parking lot. They determined Pannell was the man in the lobby.
In the video, four officers walk through the automatic sliding doors of the lobby and three immediately raise their guns. One holsters her weapon and switches to a taser.
Body-worn camera footage shows the officers shouting at Pannell: “Hands up.” He puts his hands up. Multiple officers then yell, “Get on the ground” multiple times, and one of the officers directs them, “One person talk.” Pannell says something inaudible, then seems to say, “There’s people trying to kill me.”
A female officer shouts, “You will be tased; get on the ground.”
Taser fired, then shots
Multiple officers shout more commands at Pannell. He keeps his hands stiffly raised out in front of him. Pannell says, “I don’t want to die. Please, please. I don’t want to die. Listen, please. Please.”
In response, the female officer shouts, “Taser, taser, taser,” and deploys it.
The interaction from the moment that the sliding door opened to the moment that the officer deployed her taser lasted 35 seconds.
It’s unclear whether the taser actually hit Pannell. In the video, he runs away from the officers and they chase him down a hallway.
In the footage from the chase, it’s difficult to see what happens. One officer says, “He’s running, he has a gun.” An officer fires his weapon five times down the hotel hallway. The video says officers saw Pannell hold the gun to his own head as he was running away.
By the time the officer fires the first shot, a little over a minute has elapsed since they entered the hotel.
“Stop moving!” one officer shouts down the hallway. Outside the exit door, which has shattered glass likely caused by the gunfire, a bystander is lying on the ground.
Officers shout, “Let me see your hands! Hands!” Pannell is lying on the ground, a few feet farther away. The bystander shakily raises his hands. “Are you shot?” an officer asks the bystander. (The video says the bystander was not hit by a bullet.)
When the officers approach Pannell, they see that he has two gunshot wounds — in the leg and the head. As a male officer holds one of Pannell’s arms, the female officer takes away his gun.
The video says that police officers found one spent shell casing outside the hotel that matched the ammunition in Pannell’s gun; they concluded that he fired only one shot, outside the hotel, after police started shooting at him.
Text in the video says it is uncertain whether the head wound was from the police officer’s gun, or whether Pannell killed himself as police were chasing him. A coroner’s report is still pending.
The Elk Grove Police Department said it released the video before the investigation into the incident was concluded “in the interest of transparency with the community we serve.” They published the video on YouTube Friday evening, posting a link to Twitter at 7:15 p.m.
