Caroline Small had a painful history of mental illness. Having undergone a bitter divorce, she was struggling with life when she led police on a slow-motion chase through her small town in her beat-up old car. Having run over a spike strip police set out for her, all of her tires were gone and nothing was left but the rims.



Bare rims of Caroline Small's car.

Caroline Small's car backed in on all sides with nowhere to go.

An investigative photo showing where the police shot Caroline Small

"If she moves the car, I'm going to shoot her," an officer yelled. Small pulled forward. Eight bullets tore through the windshield, striking her in the head and the face. The shooting was captured on police dash cam video. So was what the two Glynn County officers said afterward. They compared their marksmanship. One told a witness how he saw Small's head explode. Their words were as callous as Small's death unnecessary. "This is the worst one I've ever investigated," said Mike McDaniel, a retired GBI agent who supervised the 2010 criminal investigation into the officers' actions. "I don't think it's a good shoot. I don't think it's justified."

When an EMT showed up to the scene, Simpson waved him off, trusting that his stellar marksmanship had done the job, and she was dead. However, Small was holding on for dear life, and those crucial moments could have been the difference between life and death. Small would never regain consciousness, but she didn’t succumb to her injuries until a week after the shooting.

Yes, that's Caroline Small, still alive in her car, but being ignored by officers after being shot over and over again.

Within hours of the shooting, Chief Doering had formed his own opinion of what happened. Based on witness statements and dash cam video, Doering told local reporters that his preliminary review led him to believe that the officers’ feared their lives were in danger and that they acted appropriately. The next day’s news headline backed him up: “Woman shot trying to run down police.”

Police, as you will see in the photo below, had her backed in on the front and back of the car, with a tree and a ditch to the other side. Literally and figuratively, Small was stuck. Her car, at that moment, was a metaphor for her life ... wheels coming off, pressure all around her.She needed, desperately so, to be seen by mental health specialists. She was completely unarmed with nothing more than a empty plastic bottle of Mountain Dew, and police at that point should and could have simply walked up to her door, opened it up, and arrested her, gently or forcefully. Either one would've done the trick.Police, though, were determined that shooting her face off was the absolutely, without a doubt, the best course of action. This is America after all. If you sense danger, shoot someone's face off. One of the officers even told a witness he saw her head explode As police did in the deaths of Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice , and dozens of other women and men who were still fighting to live after their encounters with police, officers ignored her after she was shot The coverup started almost immediately In a brilliant piece written by Brad Schrade of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the reporter goes into painstaking detail about the lengths that the district attorney and police chief went to protect their officers in this case. The lead investigator said the officers "shot her like a deer" and that it was "one of the worst cases I've ever seen." Yet the officers were still cleared of all wrongdoing and allowed to go right back to work.

Charles Pierce, in his Esquire essay on this case states:



The story has it all. A really bad shoot. Cops refusing to call EMTs after the shooting despite the fact that their victim was still alive and would live for another week. Cops making up a bullshit story to cover their own asses. Cops tampering with the crime scene evidence, also to cover their own asses. An ambitious local prosecutor so far in the tank to the police department that she won't dry off until 2024. Attempts by outside law-enforcement to bring justice in the case that run into a stonewall so thick and high that open bureaucratic warfare breaks out between Glynn County law-enforcement and the detectives from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation tasked to look into the shooting. A grand-jury proceeding that is an embarrassment to 500 years of jurisprudence, so thoroughly rigged to no-bill the tewo officers that one of its members openly expresses his remorse for having been so completely hoodwinked. And, ultimately, no charges against the two officers and a quick-and-dirty dismissal of a civil suit brought by Caroline Small's family.

This case warrants a federal investigation. It's murder, plain and simple, and should've never gotten to this point.



