Articles
Park Police officers who shot Bijan Ghaisar are identified
Washington,
March 29, 2019
Tags:
Equality
Washington Post |
Sixteen months after Bijan Ghaisar was shot to death by two U.S. Park Police officers in Fairfax County, Va., the officers were identified for the first time Friday as Alejandro Amaya and Lucas Vinyard. No decision has been made by the Justice Department on whether the shooting was legally justified or whether the two officers will be charged with a crime. The shooting of Ghaisar, an unarmed motorist, was witnessed by two Fairfax County police officers and captured on video. The officers’ names were released to Ghaisar’s family as part of their wrongful death lawsuit over the Nov. 17, 2017, shooting. Amaya and Vinyard were formally named as defendants in an amended complaint filed Friday in federal court in Alexandria. Several minutes later, Amaya and Vinyard spotted the Jeep on the parkway south of Alexandria, followed it in a marked sport-utility vehicle and signaled the Jeep to pull over. A Fairfax County police lieutenant, who has not been identified, pulled onto the parkway behind the Park Police’s and Ghaisar’s vehicles, with his in-car video camera on. The Park Police do not have in-car cameras or body cameras. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) have introduced a bill requiring all federal uniformed police officers to wear body cameras. |