On June 17, 1994, O.J. Simpson was asked to surrender in connection with the murder of his ex-wife and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Instead of showing up at the police station, he fled and led authorities on a wild chase across L.A.’s freeways with a broadcast live on television around the world. The car chase started in Orange County and ended in his Brentwood driveway.
During the chase, Simpson talked to his mother, and detective Tom Lange who was heard almost begging O.J. to surrender and give up the gun he was supposedly holding to his own head.
He endearingly called him ‘Juice’ and kept telling him how so many people loved him. He was comforting him and asking him to throw the gun out the window because he ‘was scaring’ them.
Simpson never stopped and didn’t surrender the gun. The several police cruisers following him never even tried to surround him or stop him. They did not blow his tires with a pike strip, which would have been easy to do. They never shot at the car even if they knew he was armed and possibly dangerous.
They treated him with kid gloves and some say with great humanity. They probably were too afraid to go after the Juice, considering that it was televised and people were cheering him along the way. Thousands of people encouraged their favorite footballer to break the law and resist arrest. Strange social phenomenon if you ask me when you consider that he was being charged with murdering two people.
Caroline & ex-husband Keith Small
On June 18, 2010, Caroline Small, a 35-year-old mother of 2 who was suffering from PTSD, dissociative disorder and a drug and alcohol problem, was spotted sitting in her car in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Glynn County, Georgia by a bystander who decided to call the police because he suspected she was doing drugs.
Small who was not in her right mind, saw the cops arrive and her reaction was to drive away. A slow pace chase followed. It never exceeded 35 mph and her tires were blown out by spike strips right away.
It was a very noisy 20 minute slow motion pursuit. She ended up pinned by two cruisers and a utility pole. One of her tires had been blown when she came out of the mall and the others shortly after, and she was riding on her rims. She had no room to get out and was rendered immobilized.
Caroline Small’s car stuck between cop cars
Small was in a state of panic and continued pressing on the accelerator, but could hardly budge except for a few inches. When you watch the video of the event, the sound of the sirens is deafening and enough to send anyone’s head spinning. It must have been crazy scary for this woman not being of sound mind.
On the dashcam video, Georgia State Patrol Trooper Jonathan Malone is seen running behind Caroline’s vehicle to reach the driver’s door and assess the situation. But he quickly backs away after seeing Glynn County officers Sgt. Robert C. Sasser and Officer Michael T. Simpson with their service weapons pointed directly at him, while aiming at Small’s head.
CLICK TO WATCH THE DASHCAM VIDEO AND JUDGE FOR YOURSELF
Malone pleaded with the officers to let him get Small out of the vehicle.
“Let me get out there and get her out,” Malone calls out, according to the GBI audio transcripts.
“Hold on, hold on,” one unknown officer responds.
“If she moves the car, I’m going to shoot her,” Simpson says.
Caroline Small still alive in her car
Seconds later, Sasser and Simpson shoot Carole Small in the head. No direct verbal warning is heard ahead of time.
After the shooting, Sasser and Simpson can be seen and heard discussing their killing skills. One of them even mentions to a witness that he saw her head explode.
She was unarmed and they were close enough to the car to know this. In doubt, they could have simply waited and retreated.
What made me sick to my stomach is the fact that an EMT showed up at the scene, but was dismissed by Simpson who concluded Small was dead without even checking her vital signs. Small was still alive and getting medical help right away might have saved her life. She never regained consciousness and passed away within a week.
Glynn Police Chief Doering
Right after the incident, Chief Doering went into damage control mode after reviewing the dash cam video and witness statements. He told the press that his officers had behaved properly because their lives were in danger. The headline was ‘’Woman shot trying to run down police.’’
In June 2012, Nathan Williams and William J. Atkins filed a wrongful death suit against the two officers and Glynn County with Keith Small as the adult representative of Caroline Small’s minor child.
A Glynn County grand jury heard evidence in the case and issued a presentment saying it found no reason to charge Simpson and Sasser. There was no vote on an indictment.
Blackerby
Defense lawyer Steven G. Blackerby said that Small had committed the felony crimes of aggravated assault for driving toward officers and of attempting to elude officers.
He also said that Small committed aggravated assault when Officer Jason Dixon, who was parked beside the road, took cover behind his car.
The lawyers played patrol car videos showing Small’s 1991 Buick slowly weaving back and forth across the road on the rims of her flattened tires. Malone was seen trying to get to the driver’s side of Small’s car to pull her out but, in his deposition, he said that he was trying to get help from another officer when Simpson and Sasser decided to shoot.
Blackerby argued that Sasser and Simpson made a split-second decision and that they didn’t know whether Small had a weapon or what her intent was. They suspected she had been using drugs and there may have been a needle in the car, he said.
“So they thought she might stab them with a needle?” the judge asked.
Blackerby asserted that Small was trying to escape through a gap between Sasser’s car and Malone’s patrol car when the two officers, who were standing in the gap, opened fire.
Robert Sasser
Sasser said he believed Small was attempting to steer toward the gap, and that her car lurched straight forward into his car as the bullets pierced her windshield.
They asserted that Simpson had warned Small. Simpson’s statement on the tape said, “If she moves again, I’m going to shoot her.”
The county’s lawyers had characterized that as a warning, but Atkins said there was no way Small could have heard the statement from inside her car with sirens blaring.
“We can’t credit the warning if she can’t hear it,’’ he said.
He addressed the legal standard that officers can use deadly force if they reasonably believe they are in danger.
Atkins said Small would have had to overcome the laws of physics to get through the gap and that the reasonable thing for Sasser and Simpson to have done if they were afraid of being run down was to get out of the way.
The officers created the risk and then used deadly force, and then showed they were not in fear by not moving, he said.
Officer Michael T. Simpson
Atkins said that the officers showed a reckless disregard for Small’s right to life by not giving her first aid as she sat mortally wounded slumped and gurgling in her car. He also brought up another statement heard on tape: “I hit her right between the eyes. She’s dead.”
“Is it too much to ask to put her head back so she’s not swallowing her own blood?’’ Atkins asked.
It’s apparently what the troopers finally did after one noticed that Small was still bleeding.
He also said that Glynn County violated its own internal affairs policy by putting Sasser and Simpson back on the job before the Georgia Bureau of Investigation completed its investigation of the shooting.
A federal judge dismissed the case last September.
Atkins declared that the main purpose of the police internal affairs investigation was to excuse the officers’ conduct.
The investigation of the incident cleared them of any wrongdoing. Both cops remain employed as police officers in Georgia and were never disciplined.
Police shootings are generally protected by law not only if a reasonable threat existed, but if the cop involved perceived a threat. But in this case, it is obvious that there was no threat whatsoever. The cops were reckless and it qualifies as plain and simple police brutality.
O.J. Simpson was too high profile for the cops to use force. It would have created a media nightmare for them. Caroline Small was an easy case to swipe under the carpet. It is unacceptable and hard to believe that the two officers were not removed from the force.
We need a police reform and poor Caroline Small cannot be forgotten. She died in vain, but maybe the outrage felt by her unjust death will create a wave of interest to force the adoption of more safeguards to avoid similar tragic deaths.
UPDATE: Officer Michael T. Simpson has since died of brain cancer.
Thank you for the well researched and faultlessly constructed piece of writing Lise; which we have come to expect from you now. It flows along nicely, so that we have a chance to follow the proceedings as they happen. Good use of contrast with the case of OJ who had allegedly murdered two people, yet was treated with kid gloves. Not so in the case of this hapless young mother, a hopeless drug addict. She and her now motherless child deserved help and respect, not this assassins’ MO. Another case for the banning of guns out of the hands of the general populace. How many times have police used the excuse for murdering innocent, unarmed people: ” he/she might have had a gun, we had to protect ourselves” ? Well, it is not an excuse they will be able to use when gun control comes in. What will those trigger happy cops do then, when they no longer have a convenient, state sanctioned outlet for their brutality? These kinds of fellows love to happen upon an incident like this, it just makes their day. They have joined the force for one reason and one reason only: to give vent to their serial killer fantasies and avoid having to go to prison for unleashing them on their vulnerable victims. No wonder so many Americans have zilch respect for what they can be forgiven for perceiving as lawless “law enforcement” officers. Cover-ups of this nature only serve to perpetuate the den of corruption that exists today in law enforcement ranks and robs the whole force of what should be their right to command dignity and respect.
I appreciate your comment Pam. I am fed up with the ”He/she might have had a gun”. It’s a licence to kill. Anyone can have a gun in the US so it means you can shoot them all in case they are packing. This is so ridiculous.
These fellows sure sounded happy to happen upon the scene. Almost eager to shoot her between the eyes. They were so confident in their marksman skills that they turned away the EMT.
Gun control would change everything. Mind you there is always the needle she might have had in the car. Maybe she could have attacked them with it.
Seems to me if her attorneys made exactly your argument there might have been a different outcome,Lise.
I am so angry about this.Lately I find myself aware of so many”there but for the grace of G_d,go I”situations.
Some of these cops just found legal ways to be the criminals that they are.
Anyway a great piece,again!
Thank you Beth. I couldn’t help feeling angry also about this avoidable shooting. What were they thinking? They sound like 2 hunters on the prowl. I shot her first, No I shot her first. Dumb and dumber, but heartless.
They tried to pull a fast one and it almost worked.
Thanks Lise for showing us another example of one that flew under the radar. How many more cases like this are we unaware of? Why didn’t this make national headlines or go viral? The video is shocking and sickening. I am so confused as to how these men avoided prosecution or any type of sanction at all.
Yes we need gun control. Desperately. But this case isn’t about guns, it is about giving this police force the ability to cover up a murder and protect 2 of their own. Why would anyone want these guys on their force?
We hear a lot about police misusing their powers and the need for dashcams and body cameras. Well, this was all on tape. What good did it do? This needs to be revisited by some good attorneys and a civil suit needs to be made with plenty of public attention.
Another great one Lise. I hope there can still be a reckoning…..
I agree Lori. This case should be revisited and a civil suit should be brought in. Even with the dashcam, they were saying on the news that she tried to kill the officers and they had to shoot her. The thing is that if you watch the video, you know they’re lying. It is better than nothing, but they seem pretty confident that the content will be covered up. These guys were protected and it is appalling.
Gun control might keep them from always claiming that someone might be in possession of a weapon. But it is definitely about a cover up. They get a call about a woman possibly taking drugs in her car and they think she’s armed and dangerous? Ludicrous.
Car chases are on the wane anyway. Many law enforcement agencies have a restricted pursuit Policy because of all the carnage it produces. Plus, dashcams are keeping all the fun away from the old boys.
In Canada, in most provinces, you cannot have a car chase for small crimes or traffic violations. They should have let her go.
Thank you for reading!
In my opinion this is not “reckless” but simply murderous. “Reckless” implies impredictable results, danger, etc. To shoot someone between the eyes is neither “reckless” nor “dangerous”, the result is perfectly predictable.
The USA is a place where security forces seem to have the right to kill, stretching the “reasonable” concept to any extent. There are too many cases of unarmed people killed because of futile reasons. The most impressive I can recall is the Sal Culosi case.
I have to agree with you on this one. She was shot like an animal by two cops who acted like it was fun and games to aim at her between the eyes. Why even have a car chase for someone sitting in a parking doing drugs? It could have ended so differently if they had behaved like real cops should.
The Sal Culosi case is the epitome of abuse of power. That detective basically heard them edging a bet and befriended him to make him raise the stakes so he could show up at his house with a SWAT team. Pure insanity. I read that there are 50,000 swat raids a year in the US, and most of them are unnecessary and end tragically.
Pushing a small gamble, then calling a SWAT team upon a peaceful guy, with no criminal record, who is unarmed, unaware, at his home doing nothing wrong, and shoot him in the heart. I can tell you that even in many third world countries this would not be possible.
And it is more than abuse of power: police can get away with a lot in many countries, but what appalls me of USA police is the lack of apparent motive which renders a socially psychotic sensation. Yes, in many countries you can have violent and corrupt police, but usually they have some defined aim: profit, repress a social group, even a personal grudge. In USA it seems they kill for fun, almost at random and for no reason.
Have recently discovered your blog and find it echoes my own thoughts and beliefs (albeit much more eloquently than I could). This is yet another case of police officers enjoying the act of killing and not serving and protecting, as they are sworn to do. The police here in the US are always assumed to be right. Good reason to live in fear.