WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES Guardian

Surveillance footage from an Ohio Walmart store, where police killed a young black man who was holding an unloaded air rifle and talking on his cellphone, shows he was was shot from the side as he moved to run away from advancing officers.



Police had repeatedly been told via a customer on the line to a 911 dispatcher that John Crawford III was pointing the gun at shoppers and may have loaded it with bullets. But the footage, released by prosecutors on Wednesday, shows Crawford walking past several customers in the minutes before he died without pointing the gun at them.

In the final moments of the footage from 5 August (warning, graphic images), Crawford is seen standing at the end of an aisle, pointing the gun downwards at his side, occasionally swinging it and holding it towards a store shelf containing pet products. Oblivious to the unfolding police response, Crawford, 22, talks casually on the phone with the mother of his two young sons.

A grand jury in Greene County declined on Wednesday to indict Sean Williams, the police officer who shot Crawford, on charges of murder, reckless homicide or negligent homicide. After hearing from 18 witnesses and considering video and audio evidence, the jurors concluded on their third day in session that Williams acted reasonably in shooting Crawford dead at the store in Beavercreek, a suburb of Dayton.

An attorney for Crawford’s family described their decision as “absolutely incomprehensible”. The US department of justice quickly announced that it would review the case with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into the possibility of federal criminal charges.



Mark Piepmeier, the special prosecutor for the case, told a press conference that Crawford was the victim of “a perfect storm of circumstances” and “didn’t do anything wrong”. However, enough of the grand jurors “decided that the police officers, and the police officer in particular that fired the shots, was justified in doing what he did”.

The officers believed that they were dealing with a so-called “active shooter situation”, Piepmeier said, and had just two weeks earlier been trained to “engage the active threat upon arrival”. He added: “Were the police facing such a situation here? No. Did they know that? No. They’re told ‘we’ve got a guy in here with a rifle, he’s holding the rifle, and he’s pointing it at people’.”

The 911 caller, Ronald Ritchie, later clarified to the Guardian in an interview that “at no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody”, stressing instead that Crawford had been “waving it around” and that the muzzle had moved in the direction of other shoppers. Ritchie told the dispatcher that Crawford pointed the rifle at two children, which the footage disproves.

The footage, which was viewed by the grand jury, showed that Crawford did not move from the spot in a corner of the store on which he was already standing by the time Ritchie called 911 to report that a six-feet-tall black man was walking around with a gun.

“He’s, like, pointing it at people,” Ritchie, 100ft away, told the 911 dispatcher, shortly after 8.22pm. The dispatcher relayed this to officers on the scene. Piepmeier disclosed on Wednesday that one officer actually called back to check and confirm this. “Yes, that’s what the caller says, he’s pointing it at people,” the dispatcher replied, according to Piepmeier.

John Crawford with his mother, Tressa Sherrod. Photograph: AP

Crawford, who was speaking on the phone to the mother of his two young sons, had picked up the unpackaged air rifle from a shelf three minutes earlier, and continued wandering the aisles. Piepmeier said the item was “designed to look like the Real McCoy”. The footage showed that Crawford quickly passed four other shoppers. He did not appear to point the rifle at any of them. The two people whose bodies could be seen in full did not visibly react to Crawford or the rifle as he passed them.

Crawford then moved in and out of range of the store’s several surveillance cameras for the next two minutes. He could not be seen pointing the BB rifle at any other customers during the footage that was recorded.

However, Piepmeier said on Wednesday that Crawford had been noticed by staff, and that a clerk called a manager to report a man walking with a rifle. “I don’t know if it’s real or not, but I’m afraid it might cause a panic,” the clerk said, according to the special prosecutor. Piepmeier added that Walmart staff were “in the process” of approaching Crawford to ask him to “put it away” when the police arrived in response to Ritchie’s 911 call.

Soon after 8.21pm, Crawford entered the pet products aisle with the rifle hoisted on his left shoulder. His father, John Crawford Jr, previously speculated in an interview with the Guardian that “the rifle maybe got heavy to him”.

Officer Sean Williams is one of two policemen placed on leave after the shooting. Photograph: Beavercreek police department

After walking to the end of the aisle and arriving near the corner of the store floor, Crawford continued his telephone conversation for more than five minutes. As he spoke, he repeatedly swung the BB gun at his side, put it back on to his shoulder, and held it horizontally, apparently directed towards the shelf packed with products. “Like most people on a cellphone, after a while you become distracted,” said Piepmeier.

Shortly before 8.25pm, Ritchie, still on the line to the dispatcher, told her: “He looked like he was trying to load it.” This, too, was relayed to the officers as they arrived at the store. About 55 seconds later, Angela Williams entered the pets aisle with two of her young children. Crawford stood totally still at the other end of the aisle with the rifle at his side, pointed at the floor. Yet Ritchie told the dispatcher: “He just pointed it at, like, two children.” Forty seconds later, the dispatcher asked: “You said he pointed it at a couple of kids?” Ritchie replied: “Right.”

Just 35 seconds later, Sean Williams and a colleague entered the aisle between Ritchie and Crawford. They stepped out to the left from the side of a product display at a right-angle to the aisle. One officer can be heard shouting “down” in the background of Ritchie’s 911 call. Crawford, still side-on to the officers, instantly bent his knees as if to prepare to run in the other direction. Then he was shot twice in quick succession by Williams. The footage suggests that all this took place in the single second after the officers entered the aisle.

“He’s still on the phone when these officers confront him, he’s probably not paying attention to what he’s doing, and this happens,” said Piepmeier. In contrast, Ritchie told reporters afterwards that Crawford clearly noticed the officers and chose to ignore their commands.

One shot entered the back of Crawford’s left elbow, the other into his side near his liver. He dropped his BB rifle, ran forwards momentarily before apparently encountering another officer advancing from that direction. He turned around and moved briefly back in the direction of the officer who shot him, before collapsing on the ground and being restrained. “Shots fired”, an officer said over his radio. Officer Williams moved to restrain Crawford on the ground.

As customers screamed and scrambled for the exits, Angela Williams, who had a heart condition, went into cardiac arrest and later died.

“All I can say about this case is that it’s a tragedy,” said Piepmeier on Wednesday. “It’s a tragedy for the Crawford family, it’s a tragedy for the family of Angela Williams, who died because of all the stress and commotion from this, and it’s also a tragedy for the police officers who have to live the rest of their lives knowing that even though they had a justified use of force, they took the life of someone that didn’t need to die.”