Corey Jones (1984?-2015), a drummer and city housing inspector, was shot dead by a plainclothes police officer in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida on October 18th 2015. Jones did have a gun, but it is unclear whether he used it. The police officer was not injured. The shooting has led to protests. His family has hired Benjamin Crump, who was the lawyer for Trayvon Martin’s family, also in Florida.
Jones was coming back late at night after playing drums with the Future Prezidents at a bar in Jupiter. His car broke down. He called a bandmate. They could not get his car started.
At 2.30am, the bandmate leaves and Jones waits for the tow truck.
His gun: Because Jones travels late at night with expensive band equipment, he bought a gun a year and a half ago for protection. He bought a new gun on October 15th. He had a permit for it.
At 2.50am, he calls his older brother.
At 3.15am, a white van pulls up in front of his car. A man gets out. According to family lawyers, Jones at some point ran. He never fired his gun. The man fired his gun six times, hitting Jones three times. One bullet broke his arm. Another entered the side of his body and went through the aorta near his heart, killing him. By this point Jones was pretty far from his car, 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30 metres). His gun was in the grass between him and his car.
That man was Nouman Raja, a Palm Beach Gardens police officer. He was not in uniform. His car was unmarked. He was at a stake-out at a nearby hotel where cars had been stolen. He left his post without permission to check out Jones’s car, which he thought was abandoned. Proper procedure would have been to send police in uniform in a marked police car. This was right off I-95, the main road that goes up the US east coast.
Raja says he got out of his car and was “suddenly confronted by an armed subject.”
Raja has been on the police force since April. Before that, he was with the police department in Atlantis for eight years. He left in good standing, but had been written up three times: once for not following proper procedure during a pursuit, twice for mishandling evidence. Translation: Raja could have easily moved Jones’s gun.
Camera footage: The Palm Beach Gardens police do not use body cameras or dashcams. There is a surveillance camera near the scene. Its footage has not (yet) been made public.
Raja’s statement has not been made public, although the police were quick to out him. He is on paid leave while the county’s state attorney and sheriff look into the matter in an “independent” investigation.
Jones had no police record. He grew up in the church and was not the sort to get into fights. Those who knew him said he was “not violent”, “not confrontational”, “meek”, “humble” and “God-fearing”.
– Abagond, 2015.
See also:
- Twitter: #JusticeForCorey
- Trayvon Martin
- Alan Blueford
- Black Brute stereotype
- The list of unarmed Black people killed by police in 2015 – Jones would not make this list.
531
heartbreaking.
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This guy is a year older than me. smh
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This is all about race. Apperently their is no such thing as a legally armed Black man.
An armed white guy protecting his stuff that’s normal.
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“Apperently their is no such thing as a legally armed Black man.”
@Michael Barker
I wonder how many (if any at all) criminal court legal precedents there are of Black men who have *justly* killed a police officer in defense of their life, family or home?
I don’t recall where I read that in some states it is legal to kill a wayward policeman in defense of your life. It may have been on the Open Thread, here.
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They are going to kill the wrong Negro one day. One with a family member (or members plural) like Christopher Dorner. One whose love goes beyond grief into that place beyond the pale (pun intended) of pure rage. And this will be the spark to set off a long dormant keg. Then cue the Martial Law and FEMA camps. We need to separate from these people immediately. It is our only chance. Time and history has shown us that they, like pedophiles, are a cursed people and caanot be rehabilitated. Leave them to fester by themselves lest they take us with them in their obsessive hatred. I can’t wait to leave Babylon fast enough. I feel for this mans family. This man could have been my brother. He’s almost the same age. My God.
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Well this Raja guy doesn’t seem all that white to me, so there is bound to be more “openness” concerning this ghastly killing by the police and the media.
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Of course, Raja disregarded protocol. And all Jones probably saw was some guy hopping out of a van, quite possibly to mug and/or carjack him. So Jones legged it, but he didn’t get far, apparently.
Which is odd, considering Jones could have shot Raja but, for whatever reason, didn’t. I’m thinking the gun was fished out of the car after the fact and planted in the grass.
@darqbeauty
You’re gonna need a black equivalent to Timothy McVeigh.
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So let me get this straight. A black man running FROM the police is an instant death sentence?
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Benjamin Crump, the civil rights attorney representing Cory Jones family:
“Corey never saw a badge, He doesn’t know if he’s about to be mugged, if he’s about to be robbed, if he’s about to be killed. Corey went to his grave not knowing he was killed by an officer.”
“That’s your Second Amendment right as an American citizen,” Crump said. “Are people going to come and support Corey’s right to have his gun and protect himself? Or are they going to say that’s not a convenient argument because it was Corey Jones?”
In other words the 2nd amendment only applies to white people.
Cory Jones had been granted a license for a concealed weapon permit but it did nothing to protect him from the police and the assumptions they have about non whites.
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The murdering cop will go unpunished.
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“The murdering cop will go unpunished.” Yup.
It’s depressing. When their is no chance of justice then their can never be closure. A segment of out population lives with wounds that can never be healed.
It should be interesting to see if the NRA issues a statement or ignores the story.
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How many of these murders by police are we going to allow?
How are we going to stop these murders by police?
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[…] Sourced through Scoop.it from: abagond.wordpress.com […]
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@ Joe
Well this Raja guy doesn’t seem all that white to me, so there is bound to be more “openness” concerning this ghastly killing by the police and the media.
I agree.
At first I thought that Raja was Hispanic but looking at his name I suspected him to be East Indian or close of that.
This detail is not mentioned by most of the media articles on the case but here
http://dukefmduluth.com/news/articles/2015/oct/22/florida-musician-killed-by-plainclothes-cop-never-fired-gun-lawyer/
is said that he is an Asian American:
Jones was driving home to Boynton Beach after a gig with the band Future Prezidents when his car broke down, his family said. Crump said Raja, an officer of Asian heritage, emerged from a van with tinted windows and never identified himself by showing his badge.
It seems that Black Americans are being disrespected by people of various origins in their home country!
Time to think!
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Whaat! Shoot first,ask questions later! This police officier is questionable. Has he not been informed of the problems of assumptions. Please when will we really get what justice is all about? Nothing will make it right for the family. Blessings for his connections surrounding s his life.
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The worse part is that many speak about how sad it is and want to cry about it afterwards, but organize to stop it from happening.
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Babylon will be in flames. Best to leave.
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Fri 23 Oct 2015 at 00:30:51
Lord of Mirkwood
Sometimes I wonder why we let the Confederate states back into the Union, instead of administering them under military occupation.
Because the position of the United States is that the Southern states did not have the right to secede and their idea of being a separate country was a figment of their imagination. I don’t think any other country every recognized the Southern States that seceded as their own country either, not even England which needed them for cotton pretty badly.
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Raja fired.
Benjamin Crump, Cory family attorney:
“While we are pleased that the city of Palm Beach Gardens has terminated the employment of the officer who gunned down Corey Jones, we maintain that the officer in question also must be held criminally liable for his reckless actions that night,” the Jones family said via a statement Thursday. “Our family remains hopeful that the outside agencies brought in to investigate Corey’s killing will soon begin to yield factual information about how and why this officer acted so callously.”
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/palm-beach/sfl-nouman-raja-fired-after-corey-jones-police-shooting-city-says-20151112-story.html
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Huffington Post story says that phone records indicate that Cory was on the phone with road side assistance when he was shot.
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https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20151024/corey-jones-shooting-officer-who-shot-him-study-in-contradictions
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https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20190425/nouman-raja-sentencing-raja-gets-25-years
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I randomly came across this video with the phone calls made that night.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6hI80PDeGc)
It’s crazy how Raja shot Jones within seconds of seeing him and then called 911 as if he was still talking to Jones. He didn’t realize Jones was on the phone with roadside assistance and that caught everything that happened. I can only feel bad for Jones and his family regardless of the fact that Raja was convicted. The guy just wanted to get home.
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