ST. LOUIS — The St. Louis police chief says an autopsy shows that an 18-year-old who was shot and killed by an officer this week died from a single wound in the back.
Police Chief Sam Dotson tells the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the location of Mansur Ball-Bey’s wound neither proves nor disproves two officers’ accounts that Ball-Bey pointed a gun at them before they shot at him Wednesday.
Dotson says that “just because he was shot in the back doesn’t mean he was running away.”
An attorney for Ball-Bey’s family says witnesses told him Ball-Bey was unarmed.
A University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist, David Klinger, says the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled it constitutional for police to shoot someone in the back if they believe that person could be a threat.
