Jacqueline Salyers (1983?-2016), an unarmed, pregnant mother of four, was shot dead by police on January 28th 2016 in Tacoma, Washington, south of Seattle. She belonged to the Puyallup Tribe, who have been living in Tacoma since before Tacoma was Tacoma. In the US, Native Americans are 30% more likely to be killed by police than Blacks, three times more likely than Whites.
Kenneth Wright Jr, her long-time boyfriend and father of her two youngest children, was wanted by police on robbery, gun and drug charges. On January 28th police spotted him in a parked car with Salyers.
The police say they approached with guns drawn and ordered them to get out with their hands up. Salyers, “a Native American female that appeared to be around 30 years of age”:
“stepped on the gas, and accelerated toward the officers. One of the officers fired at and hit the driver.”
Officer Scott Campbell, with the car just “inches” away from running him over, opened fire. The car went another 50 feet (15m) before stopping. He was unharmed. Salyers was shot in the head, arm and stomach. Wright shouted, “You fucking killed her!” and ran off into the night, gun in hand. It took police 18 days to find him again.
The police say they saw signs of acceleration in the dirt.
Eyewitnesses say police approached the car from behind. The police did not announce themselves. There were no signs of acceleration in the dirt. Her uncle:
“Witnesses told me they took her out of the car, dragged her to the curb, put her in a police car, drove her a short distance away and dragged her out again onto the pavement. She must have died sometime during all this. The people who spoke to me found this extremely painful.”
Her cousin, who prepared her body for burial, said her arm was broken.
The angle of the gunfire seems to show that the police were not directly in front of the car at the time of the shooting.
Her car, with three or four gunshots in the windshield, a shattered driver-side window and an exit bullet hole in the car door.
Video: None. No bodycams, no dashcams. A nearby police camera was working fine before and after the shooting, but not during. Three security cameras on a nearby house were destroyed by police.
Protests: There were “Justice For Jackie” protests calling on the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the State Patrol to do an independent investigation. They were unmoved, leaving the Tacoma police to investigate themselves.
Department of Justice, Washington, DC.
A tribal councilman, along with her uncle and others, travelled to Washington, DC, to the DOJ’s Office of Tribal Justice. The Office offered no help.
The county prosecutor, Mark Lindquist, concluded the death was justifiable homicide under state law which requires:
“a showing of malice to prove an officer acted criminally.”
The key word is “malice”, a state of mind, which is hard to prove. The Puyallup Tribe, NAACP and others are pushing Initiative 873 to reform this.
Last year, in the very same county, police killed Daniel Covarrubias, He was also Native (Suquamish). The police thought his mobile phone was a gun.
Native Americans killed by police (L to R) – Top row: Marcus Lee, Lance McIntire, Daniel Covarrubias (same county as Salyers), Raymond Eacret, Jessie Lee Rose; Middle row: Jacqueline Salyers, Mah-hi-vist Goodblanket, Richard Estrada, Jeanetta Riley, Larry Kobuk; Botton row: Jamie Lee Brave Heart, Loreal Tsingine, Corey Kanosh, Allen Locke (killed the day after he took part in a protest against police brutality), Sarah Lee Circle Bear (died the same month as Sandra Bland, also in police custody). Click on the picture to find out more about each one of these.
– Abagond, 2016.
See also:
- Welcome to Native American Heritage Month 2016
- Native Americans
- killer cops
- Black pathologies – strangely like the Native ones
- Sam Dubose – also supposedly killed for trying to run over the police. Video showed that to be a police lie.
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Abagond 
[…] Source: Jackie Salyers […]
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Old habits of brutality die hard.
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On another note, the Puyallup Tribe is fairly affluent. They own a casino, concert venues and other profitable businesses.
Prior to the business ventures, the Puyallup fought hard to maintain their treaty rights to waterways and shorelines. There are a lot of local White sport fishermen who are still angry and resentful of those rights—-and they complain loudly about how they are “discriminated against” during salmon runs, etc.
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I’m sorry but pregnant too? Cop should be hunted down skinned alive and hung by his balls….
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@ TeddyBearDaddy
One of the other women pictured, Jeanetta Riley, was also pregnant when the cops gunned her down. According to the article that the photo links to, they shot her within 15 seconds of arriving at the scene.
@ everyone
It is an excellent article and I highly recommend clicking through to read it.
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@TeddyBearDaddy
I once read that the racist white settlers in America used dried testicle skin of murdered Native Americans to make tobacco pouches.Only God knows when all this will end.
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Before I say anything else out of haste, this is horrific. I will have to do the research. The security cameras record but is there access to the actual storage of the footage?
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@TeddyBearDaddy
One house had three security cameras. The police destroyed the hard drives.
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As tribes go, the Puyallup are well off – they were able to get back some of their treaty rights after the 1960s. But they still have the same trouble with police that other Native people (and Black people) do.
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I did not have space for this in the post:
Media guide (Google hits for “Jackie Salyers” OR “Jacqueline Salyers”):
161: Twitter
108: Indian Country Today
54: Tacoma News Tribune
36: Tumblr
..
10:
9:
8:
7:
6:
5: Democracy Now
4: Yahoo News
3:
2:
1: Huffington Post, Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Kos, The Independent
0: NY Times, NY Daily News, NY Post, New Yorker, Vox, Vice, Mic, Buzzfeed, BBC, Al Jazeera, Xinhua, RT, Sputnik News, Time, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg News, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Miami Herald, Baltimore Sun, Houston Chronicle, BET, Economist, Univision, Young Turks, The Real News, NPR, The Root, The Grio, News One, Daily Beast, Breitbart News, Infowars, Drudge Report, Daily Caller.
My current media diet is in bold.
Notes:
1. The Yahoo stories were for their branches in Britain, Hong Kong, Singapore and India, not the US!
2. The stories in the Daily Kos and the Independent were about Native Americans getting killed at a higher rate than even Black Americans.
3. The Tacoma News Tribune for the most part, from what I saw, presented the police’s side of the story unchallenged. Only one article I saw quoted her family, though not at length, and even that seemed to be in defence of the police.
4. Indian Country Today is the only source I saw that covered the story in a sustained way AND presented both sides at length. Democracy Now was also a good source, as far as it went. They interviewed her uncle.
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Of the 29 police killings of Native Americans that took place between May 1st 2014, and October 31st 2015, only two (Daniel Covarrubias and Paul Castaway) got any mention in the top ten newspapers in the US:
Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Denver Post, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune.
The New York Times misreported Covarrubias as Latino.
Salyers was not mentioned in any of these newspapers.
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“One house had three security cameras. The police destroyed the hard drives.”
Right there you know the police are lying. This is a tacit admission of guilt. A cover-up. How can the county prosecutor not see that?!
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There’s alot of hardcore neo-nazis in that area. Probably the largest and most powerful (Oregon to Washington State) outside of Northern Texas.
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@Abagond
“As tribes go, the Puyallup are well off – they were able to get back some of their treaty rights after the 1960s. But they still have the same trouble with police that other Native people (and Black people) do.”
Your point is well taken. I brought up their tribal affluence because many local anti-Native Whites use Puyallup wealth and independence as justification for their attacks on the tribe. There is still a lot of resentment by local European-Americans toward the tribes for asserting their treaty rights in the 1960s and 1970s and running successful businesses and schools.
Like wealthy Black individuals, members of affluent Native American tribes are still subject to state violence, just like their poorer cousins. Race outweighs money.
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@TeddyBearDaddy
“There’s a lot of hardcore neo-nazis in that area. Probably the largest and most powerful (Oregon to Washington State)…”
Yes. Some towns and counties are quite hostile to anyone who is not European.
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[…] Jackie Salyers […]
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