Shooting a fleeing person in the back hasnt been legal since the '80's.
Going to be interesting how they whitewash this murder.
Linda Koscielny was outside when the trooper chased Stand through her yard.
“Within a foot of me. If he wanted to have hurt me, he could have grabbed me,” said Koscielny.
The trooper ordered Koscielny to get in her house.
“I couldn’t get in my house from where we was at. And I asked him; he had the gun cocked and pointed to the guy’s back the whole time, and I said please don’t shoot him. Please, don’t shoot him and kill him. He wasn’t harming him or me, and he didn’t even have his knife out at the time,” said Koscielny.
But he did pull it out soon after as he continued backpedaling away from the trooper.
“He said, ‘Just leave me alone, just leave me alone, I’m not gonna hurt anyone.’ Then he turned, ran through my yard out to the street. And I ran through my house and come out to the street, and I watched the officer unload his gun on him,” said Koscielny.
Koscielny says she asked him repeatedly if he just killed the man, but the trooper remained silent until a Nowata County deputy ran up moments later.
She said the knife only had a four inch blade, small enough that the trooper didn’t need to shoot.
“I mean, you can tase a person. You don’t have to kill them over a knife,” she said.
http://www.fox23.com/news/local/story/Neighbors-react-to-OHP-trooper-involved-shooting/4-FsgAHnoUG4wr7JeybPkw.cspxThey are fine stock indeed:
http://www.newson6.com/story/25763690/former-ohp-trooper-arrested-outside-oologah-bar-on-multiple-complaintsIn his arrest report, the deputy says the incident began when a bartender at the Ironhorse Saloon on Highway 169 in Oologah called the Rogers County Sheriff's Office to ask for an escort to her car. She said there was a man waiting in the parking lot and she believed he was stalking her.
The deputy discovered a red Dodge Challenger in the parking lot with the driver-side door open and the engine running with Pitner slumped over the steering wheel.
The deputy wrote that he was struggling to awaken Pitner when the man "shot out of the car." As the deputy put him a choke hold he felt Pitner trying to grab for the deputy's gun, so the deputy performed "a take down."
Pitner eventually lost consciousness because of the choke hold and the deputy put him cuffs and called for back-up. While looking through Pitner's wallet to try to identify him, the deputy wrote, he found Pitner's driver license as well as an Oklahoma Peace Officers Certification car and an Oklahoma Highway Patrol commission card that identified him as a state trooper.
News On 6 has learned that Pitner, who lives in Bartlesville, became a trooper on January 1, 2007 and was assigned to Troop L in Vinita.