http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poXCJ_liXTQ
35 Year Old Man Playing with Garden Hose Nozzle on Friend's Back Porch
Murdered by Long Beach, California Police for 'Threatening' While Police Hid in Ambush
"He never knew there was a problem. Police snuck down the corridor and shot him. He was killed in cold blood. He was a drunk sitting on a stoop fumbling with a hose nozzle," Eden Marie Biele [sister of victim] said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Doug Zerby and fiance
I was listening to details of this story all afternoon long on the John & Ken radio show on KFI Radio ( 640AM) on Monday, December 14. The shooting took place on Sunday, December 13, 2010, between 4:40 and 5 PM in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach, California, a relatively upscale, crime-free community. A 35 year old man, a former competitive swimmer and professionally trained diver, Doug Zerby, was sitting on the back porch steps of his best friend's second floor apartment playing with a garden hose nozzle (not attached to a garden hose) when suddenly shotgun blasts and automatic fire opened up on him, riddling his body with bullets.
The members of the Long Beach Police Department who shot Doug Zerby were hidden from his view, having taken up "tactical positions" in the bushes below him and in adjacent apartments. They opened up on him and took his life in a hail of bullets without uttering even one word to alert him to their presence.
In what has to be one of the most profane and shameful displays of cowardice and self-serving perfidy, Long Beach Chief James McDonnell told reporters at a press conference that officers were justified in shooting Zerby because "...the subject was in a seated position, he used a two-handed pistol-grip hold on an object with his arms fully extended," Chief McDonnell said. "When Mr Zerby pointed it at one of the officers, both policemen fired their weapons, a handgun and a shotgun."
Thus ended the life of Doug Zerby, father of an eight year old boy, who thought he was playing it safe by hanging out on his friend's back porch waiting for a ride, rather than risk being caught by the police driving under the influence of alcohol. How could he possibly know the cops were setting him up for an ambush?
He had been drinking. It was a Sunday afternoon.
Doug's father called into the John & Ken show and told them that Doug had been unemployed for a while. It's hardly unusual for a man in his situation to drink alcohol on a Sunday afternoon. There's no crime in drinking alcohol or to be drunk, for that matter, assuming your standing on your friend's back porch in the middle of the afternoon. The police knew he was drunk because the paranoid neighbor who reported him to the police said he looked drunk. The same paranoid neighbor also told police that he thought Doug was holding a little antique-looking pistol. He called it a "tiny six shooter".
So now a crack team of crime fighters from the City of Long Beach, California descend on Doug Zerby's friend's apartment with the stealth of a FBI SWAT team as if they were going to take out The Zodiac Killer ~ all based on the statements supplied by an unknown neighbor who now is assigned the status of expert in firearms recognition.
Chief McDonnell told reporters that his policemen had shot two rounds from a shotgun and 6 rounds from automatic weapons. However, one article posted on the internet by a man who claimed to be a friend of Doug Zerby, said that there were 27 shots fired at Doug Zerby. It you look at the photos of the murder scene you can see bullet holes along the balustrade of the back stairs and holes in the wall. If you look at the enlarged photo of the garden hose nozzle (in the police conference video clip seen below), you can see that there is NO handgun in existence that has such a short and large diameter "barrel." It's easy to see that the tapered yellow plastic ring at the end of the nozzle resembles NOTHING seen on any handgun. It's simply ludicrous that policemen, supposedly trained in weapons and firearm use, cannot recognize that this is a spray nozzle and not a handgun. You will also notice that Chief McDonnell's face becomes increasingly red as the news conference proceeds.
The Chief said that his department was anxious to be as "transparent" and forthcoming as possible. I guess that's why they kept the family of Doug Zerby waiting SEVEN HOURS before admitting to them that they had shot and killed Doug. You can see from the video that Doug's sister only finds out that her brother was blasted with a police shotgun when the 'transparent" police chief announced it to the room full of reporters.
Most disturbing in watching the video clip of Chief McDonnell at his press conference is his attempt to maintain the pretense that Doug Zerby was doing anything that would justify shooting a man in cold blood, by police hiding in ambush mode, without giving him a word of warning before taking his life.
If we lived in a reasonable world, where just men held positions of power, Doug Zerby would not have been shot on December 13 because a reasonable police depratment would limit their police recruits to men of reason, character, and good judgment; men who possessed the intelligence and prudence to make a decision which strove to protect and preserve life, rather than treat a human life like it's a throw away tissue.
If we lived in a reasonable world, police recruits would be trained at police academies where the curriculum would emphasize the diffusing of hostile emotions and tense confrontations. The emphasis would be on defence, rather than offense and the brute application of iron fisted domination and "compliance" against people-who are in most cases-not doing anything to justify heavy handed, jackboot treatment.
Someday, we may live in that world, but 'someday' will never come as long as we have inhuman thugs masquerading as policemen.
Ken Adachi
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/dougzerbymurder16dec10.shtml
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