Family Of Antwon Rose 'Grateful' For Public Support After Fatal Shooting By East Pittsburgh Officer
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PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Attorneys for the family of 17-year old Antwon Rose say his family is "grateful" for the public outpouring of support after the teen was killed by an East Pittsburgh police officer during a felony stop on Tuesday night.
Lee Merritt, a Philadelphia civil rights attorney and Fred Rabner, his Pittsburgh co-counsel, appeared during a taping of the KD-PG Sunday Edition Friday at the KDKA-TV studios. Rabner told hosts KDKA anchor Rick Dayton and Post-Gazette editorial page editor John Allison he talked with Rose's mother, Michelle Kenny, Friday morning, less than 10 hours after hundreds of protesters marched from East Pittsburgh to the Parkway East and staged a sit-in that closed the interstate highway for nearly 6 hours.
"She's so lifted up by seeing this," said Rabner, who has represented clients in other local high profile police-involved shooting cases, including the case of Leon Ford who was shot and paralyzed by Pittsburgh police in a 2012 traffic stop. "She's been inside hunkered down, mourning, and not even coming out to see the light of day. For her to turn on the news and see people, it gave chills up and down her spine and she called me tearfully this morning and said I'm so lifted up spiritually by what people are doing."
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Merritt, who has been hired by Rose's family and has represented clients in several nationally publicized cases, says the support is important to the family.
"The family is extremely grateful that the community is standing with them," Merritt said. "I've been through this with a lot of families and it's the silence from the community, the silence from political leaders, the silence from the public that continues to injure the family as if their child's life didn't mean anything at all. But Antwon was something special to this community and it's proven not only through his life but in the aftermath of what happened to him."
Both men say while all the facts of the shooting aren't known, police and the District Attorney will have a hard time explaining away what they call the "snapshot" of the incident, caught on cell phone, where Rose and another man are seeing running away while officer Michael Rosfeld fires at them.
"No matter what they eventually learn about the facts of this case, it's never going to make that action OK," Rabner said. "When we look at that snapshot, nothing we learn about the inside of that car, scouring through the decedent's pockets to find a clip. That's called justification. That's someone trying to justify an action that was improper."
Merritt calls the case "worse" than other police-involved shootings he's handled.
"As I look at it, I find very little room to justify it," Merritt told the KD-PG hosts. "The point is you can't shoot someone based on what you don't know. 'I don't know if he was involved in the firing of this previous gun, so because I don't know I'm going to kill him to keep him from evading?' That's not enough."
