National

Officer Stands Trial in 95-Year-Old’s Beanbag Shooting Death

Published

10 years ago

January 14, 2015

Park Forest police officer Craig Taylor leaves a courthouse in Markham, Ill., Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015, during a lunch break in the first day of his trial. Taylor is accused of acting recklessly by fatally shooting 95-year-old World War II veteran John Wrana with a beanbag gun at close range in an effort to subdue him at the assisted living facility where Wrana lived on July 26, 2013. (AP Photo/Sun-Times Media, Brian Jackson)

DON BABWIN, Associated Press

MARKHAM, Ill. (AP) — A suburban Chicago police officer had better and safer options than to fire beanbags to subdue a confused, knife-wielding 95-year-old World War II veteran, a prosecutor told the court Tuesday at the outset of the officer’s trial on a felony reckless conduct charge in the man’s death.

With all of their police equipment, training and “common sense,” Craig Taylor and the other Park Forest officers didn’t have to storm into John Wrana’s room at an assisted living center on July 26, 2013, Cook County State’s Attorney Lynn McCarthy said during her opening statements. They did so, though, and Taylor ended up firing five beanbags at Wrana, including the fatal one that struck his abdomen and caused internal bleeding, she said.

Taylor’s attorney, Terry Ekl, countered that Taylor did what he was trained to do to subdue a dangerous suspect who was coming at him with a knife. Wrana was determined enough that he kept coming at Taylor with a knife “over his head” until the final shot knocked it from his hand, Ekl told Judge Luciano Panici, who will decide the case.

Taylor, 43, could face up to three years in prison if he’s convicted. His trial comes amid heightened scrutiny of the use of deadly force by U.S. police departments, and there was a strong show of support by Taylor’s fellow officers Tuesday at the courthouse in Markham.

Unlike many criminal trials where there is a disagreement over exactly what happened, the prosecution and defense in Taylor’s trial agreed on the basic facts of the case in their opening statements.

Taylor was one of several officers dispatched to the facility where Wrana lived after a staff member reported that Wrana had become combative with emergency workers.

Wrana had hit a staffer with his cane and was brandishing the cane and a 2-foot long shoehorn. After officers left the room, they soon returned, with one carrying a Taser, another carrying a shield and Taylor armed with a 12 gauge shotgun that shoots beanbags. It was then that Wrana threatened the officers and refused to obey their order to drop a knife he had picked up.

One officer fired the Taser at Wrana, but missed. When Wrana moved toward Taylor with a knife, Taylor fired his weapon five times, according to prosecutors.

All of the shots were fired from no more than 8 feet away, said McCarthy, who told Panici that the “optimum distance” of 15 to 60 feet is spelled out in training standards and reminded the judge that each “projectile struck the 5-feet-five, 150 pound Wrana at about 190 miles per hour.

Wrana died from internal bleeding, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, which ruled his death a homicide.

One officer who showed to court in support of Taylor said that Taylor’s arrest is confusing to other police officers.

“There’s an outcry now for less lethal force in dealing with subjects and he used less lethal force,” said Mitchell Davis, the police chief in the nearby suburb of Robbins who once worked as an officer in Park Forest and said he knows Taylor. Davis said that while the incident had a “tragic outcome,” he believes Taylor acted properly.

As a result, he said, police officers are watching the case closely. But this case has not generated the kind of emotion that killings of unarmed black men, specifically in New York’s Staten Island and in Ferguson, Mo. Though Taylor is black and Wrana was white, neither attorney suggested race played any role in the shooting. Another factor is that the case is so unusual.

“This is so far afield from other cases that I don’t think it will have any wide ranging effect on police or have be any kind of deterrent to on-duty misconduct,” said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who has studied and written about police abuse.

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Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

Published

1 day ago

December 26, 2024

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To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

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Activism

OPINION: “My Girl,” The Temptations, and Nikki Giovanni

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame. The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.” That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

Published

3 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Nikki Giovanni. Courtesy of Nikki-Giovanni.com

By Emil Guillermo

The Temptations, the harmonizing, singing dancing man-group of your OG youth, were on “The Today Show,” earlier this week.

There were some new members, no David Ruffin. But Otis Williams, 83, was there still crooning and preening, leading the group’s 60th anniversary performance of “My Girl.”

When I first heard “My Girl,” I got it.

I was 9 and had a crush on Julie Satterfield, with the braided ponytails in my catechism class. Unfortunately, she did not become my girl.

But that song was always a special bridge in my life. In college, I was a member of a practically all-White, all-male club that mirrored the demographics at that university. At the parties, the song of choice was “My Girl.”

Which is odd, because the party was 98% men.

The organization is a little better now, with women, people of color and LGBTQ+, but back in the 70s, the Tempts music was the only thing that integrated that club.

POETRY’S “MY GIRL”

The song’s anniversary took me by surprise. But not as much as the death of Nikki Giovanni.

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame.

The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.”

That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

I’ll always see her as the Black female voice that broke through the silence of good enough. In 1968, when cities were burning all across America, Giovanni was the militant female voice of a revolution.

Her “The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,” is the historical record of racial anger as literature from the opening lines.

It reads profane and violent, shockingly so then. These days, it may seem tamer than rap music.

But it’s jarring and pulls no punches. It protests Vietnam, and what Black men were asked to do for their country.

“We kill in Viet Nam,” she wrote. “We kill for UN & NATO & SEATO & US.”

Written in 1968, it was a poem that spoke to the militancy and activism of the times. And she explained herself in a follow up, “My Poem.”

“I am 25 years old, Black female poet,” she wrote referring to her earlier controversial poem. “If they kill me. It won’t stop the revolution.”

Giovanni wrote more poetry and children’s books. She taught at Rutgers, then later Virginia Tech where she followed her fellow professor who would become her spouse, Virginia C. Fowler.

Since Giovanni’s death, I’ve read through her poetry, from what made her famous, to her later poems that revealed her humanity and compassion for all of life.

In “Allowables,” she writes of finding a spider on a book, then killing it.

And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened

For Giovanni, her soul was in her poetry, and the revolution was her evolution.

About the Author

Emil Guillermo is a journalist, commentator, and solo performer. Join him at www.patreon.com/emilamok

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Black History

Book Review: In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World

It’s a tale of heroes: the Maroons, who created communities in unwanted swampland, and welcomed escaped slaves into their midst; Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”; Marème Diarra, who walked more than 2000 miles from Sudan to Senegal with her children to escape slavery; enslaved farmers and horticulturists; and everyday people who still talk about slavery and what the institution left behind.

Published

3 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Book cover. Courtesy of Smithsonian Books.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Ever since you learned how it happened you couldn’t get it out of your mind.

People, packed like pencils in a box, tightly next to each other, one by one by one, tier after tier. They couldn’t sit up, couldn’t roll over or scratch an itch or keep themselves clean on a ship that took them from one terrible thing to another. And in the new book “In Slavery’s Wake,” essays by various contributors, you’ll see what trailed in waves behind those vessels.

You don’t need to be told about the horrors of slavery. You’ve grown up knowing about it, reading about it, thinking about everything that’s happened because of it in the past four hundred years. And so have others: in 2014, a committee made of “key staff from several world museums” gathered to discuss “telling the story of racial slavery and colonialism as a world system…” so that together, they could implement a “ten-year road map to expand… our practices of truth telling…”

Here, the effects of slavery are compared to the waves left by a moving ship, a wake the story of which some have tried over time to diminish.

It’s a tale filled with irony. Says one contributor, early American Colonists held enslaved people but believed that King George had “unjustly enslaved” the colonists.

It’s the story of a British company that crafted shackles and cuffs and that still sells handcuffs “used worldwide by police and militaries” today.

Today, discussions about cooperation and diversity remain essential.

Says one essayist, “… embracing a view of history with a more expansive definition of archives in all their forms must be fostered in all societies.”

Unless you’ve been completely unaware and haven’t been paying attention for the past 150 years, a great deal of what you’ll read inside “In Slavery’s Wake” is information you already knew and images you’ve already seen.

Look again, though, because this comprehensive book isn’t just about America and its history. It’s about slavery, worldwide, yesterday and today.

Casual readers – non-historians especially – will, in fact, be surprised to learn, then, about slavery on other continents, how Africans left their legacies in places far from home, and how the “wake” they left changed the worlds of agriculture, music, and culture. Tales of individual people round out the narrative, in legends that melt into the stories of others and present new heroes, activists, resisters, allies, and tales that are inspirational and thrilling.

This book is sometimes a difficult read and is probably best consumed in small bites that can be considered with great care to appreciate fully. Start “In Slavery’s Wake,” though, and you won’t be able to get it out of your mind.

Edited by Paul Gardullo, Johanna Obenda, and Anthony Bogues, Author: Various Contributors, c.2024, Smithsonian Books, $39.95