The Huntington Park Police Department in California has come under intense criticism for the Jan. 26 shooting death of Anthony Lowe during a confrontation.
Lowe, a double amputee who used a wheelchair, was shot 11 times and died after allegedly threatening police officers with a knife. His family and various advocates have questioned using deadly force against a disabled man whose ability to harm the officers was severely limited.
Police reportedly tracked down Lowe following a reported stabbing.
The victim, hospitalized after being stabbed in the chest with a large knife, reported that his assailant was a wheelchair user who fled after the attack. Police later confronted Lowe, who was armed with a large knife and allegedly “ignored the officer’s verbal commands and threatened to advance or throw the knife at officers,” according to a statement from the Huntington Park Police Department, the BBC reports.
Police claim to have used a taser on Lowe twice before shooting him 11 times. At least two officers are on administrative leave over the shooting.
Lowe’s family and activists have expressed anger and disbelief at the idea that a man whose lower legs were amputated and who needed a wheelchair for mobility posed an imminent threat to police officers.
“Both the officers and the public were not at threat,” Lowe family attorney Annee Della Donna said, according to NBC News. “He was a handicapped person suffering from a mental crisis.”
Many people in Lowe’s community and on social media have shared his family’s outrage over his killing. Attorney Olayemi Olurin posted on Twitter that “ANTHONY LOWE JR. was a 36 year old double amputee who was hobbling AWAY from police officers with a knife in hand when 3 officers chased him and shot him 11 times in the back.”
ANTHONY LOWE JR. was a 36 year old double amputee who was hobbling AWAY from police officers with a knife in hand when 3 officers chased him and shot him 11 times in the back. The officers are all on paid leave and their identities are being concealed from the public. pic.twitter.com/h1U1406yQz
— Olayemi Olurin (@msolurin) February 8, 2023
NBC News reported Lowe’s family said he awoke on the morning of his killing “agitated and frustrated” about the loss of his legs, which were amputated below the knees one year earlier.
The family claimed this resulted from a prior incident with police; another family attorney, Christian Contreras, said the earlier incident occurred in Texas and started as a case of Lowe being “harassed by police officers,” according to the New York Post.
Lowe’s mother, Dorothy, called the police to perform a welfare check on him around 10 a.m., with officers talking to him for about 30 minutes. The later encounter with police, which led to Lowe’s killing shortly after 3:40 p.m., was captured on several videos, some of which have not yet been publicly released.
Lowe’s killing is the latest of several lethal encounters with police that Black men have faced around the country, including Tyre Nichols‘ death, and this has led to renewed calls for police reform. With everyone from grieving family members to community activists to President Joe Biden calling for changes to policing in the country, the debate over how to stop these deadly encounters remains, even as change remains too slow for people like the Lowe family who have lost loved ones to police violence.
