Baltimore Police Shoot & Injure 14-Year-Old Boy Holding A Replica Gun
It’s like Tamir Rice all over again….
On the anniversary of the Freddie Gray riots, a Baltimore police detective shot and injured a boy carrying a replica gun.
14-year-old Dedric Colvin, an eighth-grader at City Springs Middle School, was shot in the shoulder and in the leg after police mistook the spring-air-powered BB gun he was carrying for a semiautomatic pistol.
Photo: Baltimore Police
Via the Baltimore Sun:
Davis said two plainclothes detectives assigned to the Police Department’s intelligence section were driving in the 1100 block of E. Baltimore St. shortly after 4 p.m. Wednesday when they spotted the boy with what appeared to be a firearm.
The detectives got out of their vehicle, identified themselves as officers and told him to stop, Davis said. The boy began running, the officers gave chase for about 150 yards, and one detective shot the boy, Davis said.
Young said she was home Wednesday afternoon when an older son came banging on the front door.
“Ma,” Alvin Colvin said. “The police shot Dedric.”
Young said she ran outside to find the boy bleeding in a side street near a basketball court.
“All I could see was blood,” she said. “I was screaming.”
Police did not release the boy’s name. They said he was 13.
They did release a photograph of the gun they said he was carrying. It appeared to show a Daisy brand PowerLine Model 340 spring-air pistol.
After decades in law enforcement, Davis said, he might have mistaken it for a firearm.
“I looked at it myself today, I stood right over top of it, I put my own eyes on it,” he said. “It’s an absolute, identical replica semiautomatic pistol. Those police officers had no way of knowing that it was not, in fact, an actual firearm. It looks like a firearm.”
After Dedric was shot, his mother, Volanda Young, was handcuffed and placed in a police car when she tried to leave to call the hospital.
“It was humiliating,” she said.
She said she was taken to a police station and asked questions. At one point, she said, she was put in a cell. She said officers told her she was being belligerent.
After two hours, she estimated, she was driven to the hospital: “I begged them to take me.”
She spoke in her home Wednesday evening. A medal that Dedric earned in the Baltimore Urban Debate League hangs on a trophy in the living room.
“He gets good grades. My son is a good kid,” Young said. “I know he was scared. They shot at him while he was fleeing.”
She said she didn’t know where he got the BB gun.
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