Minnesota officer’s lawyer blames victim’s weapon, not race

A suburban Minnesota police officer who killed a black motorist reacted to the man’s gun, not his race, his attorney said Saturday, giving the most detailed account so far of why the officer drew his own weapon.

St. Anthony Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez was reacting to “the presence of that gun and the display of that gun” when he opened fire on Philando Castile, Minneapolis attorney Thomas Kelly told the Associated Press.

Whether or not a black man is legally in possession of a gun might not matter in the tense moments of an encounter with an officer, said Philip Smith, president and founder of the National African American Gun Association.

Kelly said Yanez, who is Latino, is “overcome with sadness” over the shooting in the St. Paul suburb of Falcon Heights, a mostly white community of 5,000 that is served primarily by the nearby St. Anthony Police Department.

Yanez’s position with the 23-member department was his first in law enforcement, after jobs in security and doing contract immigration compliance work, Kelly said.

In 2014, the department selected Yanez to be part of a special crime prevention unit, whose members were hand-picked based on “their initiative, creativeness and varied backgrounds in law enforcement,” according to the department’s annual report.

Several videos, including squad car video, have been collected, though St. Anthony officers don’t wear body cameras, authorities said.

A clearly distraught person who appears to be a police officer stands at the car’s window, tells her to keep her hands up and says: I told him not to reach for it.

Court records show the traffic stop was at least the 52nd time Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria supervisor, had been pulled over in the Minneapolis-St.

No recent information is available on the racial breakdown of drivers stopped or ticketed by police in Falcon Heights or in other Minnesota towns.

Overall, officers stopped minority drivers at greater rates than whites and searched them at greater rates, but found contraband in those searches at lower rates than whites.

The next night, five police officers were fatally shot and others were wounded during protests in Dallas over Castile’s killing and the fatal police shooting of 37-year-old black man Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., after a scuffle with officers outside a convenience store.